from the Baltimore Sun:
Born of GOP's 'Southern strategy'
Thomas F. Schaller
December 19, 2007
In the 40 years between 1966 and 2006, the Republican Party rose from a marginalized minority party into a national governing majority. Though the GOP made significant gains among white Catholics, suburban women and other slivers of the population, it was the conversion of white Southerners and the somewhat-overlapping mobilization of evangelicals that propelled what Karl Rove has called the Republicans' "rolling realignment."
For most of the past four decades, however, national Republicans enjoyed the electoral benefits of their Southern, evangelized base without paying much of a political price. Notice, for example, how well the "Southern strategy" - innovated by Barry Goldwater, adopted by Richard Nixon, perfected by Ronald Reagan and inherited by George W. Bush - worked despite the fact that Republicans didn't nominate a Southern presidential or vice presidential candidate until 2000. (The president's father was a transplanted Yankee.)
A party can take its base voters for granted only for so long before there must be an accounting, and that accountability moment seems to have arrived in the past month in the form of Mike Huckabee.
Mr. Huckabee is the political phenom of the 2008 cycle. The former Arkansas governor is surging in the polls, and not only in Iowa - where he now has a considerable lead after polling in the single digits just a few months ago - but nationally as well.
Mr. Bush, of course, is a Southerner and a born-again Christian. What, then, distinguishes Mr. Huckabee from Republican nominees of the past? Plenty, but most significantly this: The new man from Hope is not a product of the GOP's establishment wing. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.schaller19dec19,0,2606791.column
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