“We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns. It’s the Southerners. They get on TV and go, ‘Errrr, errrrr.’ People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re Southerners. The party’s being taken over by Southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?’ ” ---
Ohio Sen. George Voinovich, on the state of the Republican Party
Kathleen Parker translates:
'Those ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks are ruining the party.'
Southerners weighing heavily on Republican PartyBy KATHLEEN PARKER
Aug. 4, 2009
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Not all Southern Republicans are wing nuts. Nor does the GOP have a monopoly on ignorance or racism. And, the South, for all its sins, is also lush with beauty, grace and mystery. Nevertheless, it is true that the GOP is fast becoming regionalized below the Mason-Dixon, and becoming increasingly associated with some of the South's worst ideas.
It is not helpful (or surprising) that “birthers” — conspiracy theorists who have convinced themselves that Barack Obama is not a native son — have assumed kudzu qualities among Republicans in the South. In a poll commissioned by the liberal blog, Daily Kos, participants were asked: “Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?”
Hefty majorities in the Northeast, Midwest and West believe Obama was born in the U.S. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten, only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure. Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.
Though Voinovich's views may be shared by others in the party, it's a tad late — not to mention ungrateful — to indict the South. Republicans have been harvesting Southern votes for decades from seeds strategically planted during the Civil Rights era. When Lyndon B. Johnson predicted in 1965 that the Voting Rights Act meant the South would go Republican for the next 50 years, he wasn't just whistling Dixie.
A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: “Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, ‘burned the paint off the walls.' As they left the hotel, Nixon said, ‘This is the future of this party, right here in the South.' ”
That same rage was on display again in the fall of 2008, but this time the frenzy was stimulated by a pretty gal with a mocking little wink. Sarah Palin may not have realized what she was doing, but Southerners heard the dog whistle.
The curious Republican campaign of 2008 may have galvanized a conservative Southern base, but it also repelled others who simply bolted and ran the other way. Whatever legitimate concerns the GOP may historically have represented were suddenly overshadowed by a sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.
What the GOP is experiencing now, one hopes, are the death throes of that 50-year spell that Johnson foretold. But before the party of the Great Emancipator can rise again, Republicans will have to face their inner Voinovich and drive a stake through the heart of old Dixie.
The only stakes that need to be driven home are those through the black hearts of these bigoted, hate-filled monsters who would pit American against American in the land of beauty, grace and mystery.