State Dems assess defeats, ponder rebirth

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Their minority status in South Carolina for a long time to come was reconfirmed Nov. 2, national leaders are groping for a solution amid hearty recriminations and rank-and-file activists are wondering if the party has finally hit bottom.

Nationally, Democrats failed to oust President Bush and suffered a four-seat net loss in the Senate and several in the House, pushing them deeper into the minority in both chambers.

In South Carolina, the party was unable to keep an open U.S. Senate seat it had held since the Reconstruction era of the 1870s. That left the GOP with both senators and four of six U.S. House members.

Bruce Ransom, a political science professor at Clemson University's Strom Thurmond Institute, said Republicans continue to win the message war, defining Democrats on GOP terms, aided in part by the latter's acquiescence.

"They have been defined as liberals favoring big government, tax and spenders, and being out of step with the majority of voters on moral, religious, and cultural issues," Ransom said, and "regardless of the Democratic candidate and the message, the Republicans have created the prism through which the Democratic message is filtered."

The Democrats' solid base of supporters will have to be expanded before the party can be competitive in South Carolina and win enough states to carry the White House, he said.

The Greenville News asked five prominent South Carolina Democratic Party figures, with different backgrounds and experience, to assess what's right with the party, what's wrong and what they would do to fix it.

They are U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of Columbia, the state's first black congressman since the final decade of the 19th century; Joe Erwin, Greenville advertising executive and state Democratic Party chairman; Don Fowler, Columbia communications executive and former national Democratic Party chairman; Kevin Geddings, a Sumter native and now a Charlotte-based Democratic consultant; and former Gov. Jim Hodges of Columbia.

Recommendations ranged from a call for fine-tuning to a big-time housecleaning at the national level. One point of agreement: There's no quick fix.

Clyburn

"A lot of people did not want to admit as to how polarized our state and nation have become," something Clyburn said began with Nixon's 1968 "Southern strategy," developed at least in part by South Carolinians "who understood the role race plays in politics."

The ongoing polarization covers culture, race and religion, he said.

"When you get a combination of these things, it gets to be lethal. I don't think it's any accident that you've got 43 congresspeople who are African-American and all are Democrats," Clyburn said, plus "30 or so in the South Carolina Legislature, all of whom are Democrats."

Many now serving as elected Republicans were once Democrats, "so you see a tremendous shift that's taken place in the South."

Clyburn said the situation "has been hard to deal with, but we've got to deal with it. Part of our problem as Democrats is that we don't seem to have the stomach to do some of the things that need to be done. Maybe we like to be kind to each other, but sometimes in politics there needs to be hardball."

The party is not out of touch with a mainstream America that votes against its best interests because the GOP has trumped Democrats' messages, from Social Security to social issues, he said. "They've turned our strengths against us."

A reversal will take some time, maybe requiring "some calamity outside of our control to do that. I don't know if we can."

Without naming names, Clyburn said a housecleaning of the party's "rotten apples" is necessary to jump-start the process.

Erwin

Among the group, the state chairman puts the happiest face on the situation.

Erwin said he is encouraged because his party didn't lose any legislative incumbents, defeated a switcher and won back an open Senate seat in an expensive contest in Columbia in which Republican Gov. Mark Sanford was heavily involved.

"That's encouraging. The other side of that coin is we need to understand we're not competing enough around the state" by failing to field candidates in what are now Republican areas, he said.

The effect, Erwin said, doesn't allow for a strong Democrat to run "and make the good campaign that potentially wins, in that initial opportunity or sets the stage for victory two years or four years down the line."

And the state party suffers from the national party's image problem.

The national party must give voice to its membership outside the Washington establishment and address the type candidates offered for the presidential nomination.

Erwin said neither the party nor its primary electorate is too liberal for 21st-century America, but the schedule of caucuses and primaries is a virtual guarantee for the nomination of a blue-state liberal likely to fare poorly in November.

"We ought to look at that calendar and ask ourselves if this is the best process for producing a candidate that represents the best chance across America, that can change the red state-blue state map. The current process doesn't give us the best opportunity to have that," Erwin said.

Fowler

"The big difficulty, the long-range, major difficulty is that Democrats have been ashamed to be Democrats in South Carolina and they treat other Democrats at arm's length — some do, anyway," Fowler said.

"You can't apologize for being a Democrat and then go out and run on the Democratic ticket and expect people to be persuaded by some diversionary appeal."

Neither the national party nor the Democratic primary electorate is too liberal, Fowler said. "We have let the other side win the word game, the label game, and that's a mistake."

The issue is how to articulate issues in terms of their effect on people and dealing with people on a basis of substantive issues, he said.

Turnaround won't begin until the party is able to "explain to people, with pride, with force and conviction," what it stands for.

What Fowler said he is seeing and hearing isn't initially comforting — a lot of knee-jerk comparisons parroting media reports, "a fear of being forthright with the public and being willing to take on the other side."

The next chairman must be someone outside the Washington political culture, he said, "who understands message formulation and delivery and organization building for selective reconstruction" in some Southern states and elsewhere.

Geddings

Too much same ol', same ol', Geddings said.

"Inez Tenenbaum's horrific 44 percent showing (for an open Senate seat) is a wake-up call for South Carolina Democrats that they must jettison candidates and party leaders who have been around eating at the party's table since 1994.

"The South Carolina Democratic Party has become an isolated enclave of liberal activists in a sea of mainstream conservatism unable to articulate a compelling message of innovative ideas to a right-of-center electorate," said Geddings, whose strategy propelled Hodges to an upset victory over an incumbent Republican governor in 1998.

"The state party painfully resembles the national party in its inability to shed old skin and become something more appealing," Geddings said.

"We desperately need a John Edwards-style wealthy, self-made guy or gal who is willing to self-fund a campaign for statewide office," Geddings said. "Someone with the courage to ignore the state Democratic Party so-called leadership and go their own way to win a campaign of new ideas and a better future for working people of all skin colors."

Hodges

To Hodges, "the problem is the image of the Democratic Party nationally," making it "harder for candidates to distinguish themselves from the national party, and they have to spend too much energy and resources doing so."

Despite fielding quality candidates, "it's just been difficult for them to overcome perceptions in the South that the Democratic Party is pro-tax, pro-big government, pro-gay marriage, and weak on defense. That's the bad news. The good news is that an agenda of job protection, better health care and stronger public schools is a winning one — if that message is consistently communicated from top to bottom.

"And I think the party has to perform a mea culpa admit to working-class and middle-class Americans because we've done a poor job of advancing their priorities, and ask for a fresh look at the new Democratic agenda," Hodges said.

Like Fowler, he called for new leadership from outside Washington, perhaps from a Southern or Midwestern governor.

"We can't keep turning to the same inside-the-Beltway crowd that has not been able to achieve any success. In football terms, our new coach shouldn't be saddled with players that couldn't get the job done or plays that don't work," Hodges said.

Dan Hoover covers politics and can be reached at 298-4883.