I've been meaning to revisit the post I wrote last week entitled "Condescending to Voters, Playing to Perceived Racial Fears Does Not Work" in which I tried to dispel the notion that Republican tactics of trying to make the special congressional elections in Louisiana and Mississippi earlier this month about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright worked, or would work going forward. As I wrote then:

Just because an election is held in a conservative part of the South does not mean that voters think about race like Jim Clark did in 1965 or Orval Faubus did in 1957 or Strom Thurmond did in 1948. Voters do not like being treated like they are racists by anyone, particularly by a party to whom they have given their support in recent elections.

This sentiment came from a couple of places. First, the numbers out of both LA-06 and MS-01 did not bear out the theory that an attempt to appeal to perceived racial fears was successful. In fact, the numbers suggested just the opposite: Voters cared much more about real issues than they did about Obama's former pastor. Moreover, recent political history suggests that while not all White Southerners would call themselves progressive, they are not regressive on the issue of race, either.

Ethan Bronner highlighted this well in his very interesting and informative tome on the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, "Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America." Overall, the book is a great read and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in judicial nomination process or the Supreme Court more broadly (I blazed through it in just a few days in December).

To the point of this post, Bronner writes that one of the keys to the defeat of the Bork nomination was the successful effort to get Southern Democrats in the Senate to vote against Ronald Reagan's choice to replace Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court. In the end, the Bork nomination failed on a 58 to 42 vote, with just two Democrats -- Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and David Boren of Okahoma -- voting for Bork. A total of 16 Southern or border-state Democrats (18 if you count West Virginia) voted against Bork, including conservatives like John Stennis of Mississippi and Richard Shelby of Alabama (who switched his party affiliation to the GOP following the 1994 elections).

One of the key reasons why Southern Democrats voted against Bork rather than for him, as many had expected them to do, was polling showing that Southern White voters did not want to reopen the race battles of the 1950s and 1960s by overturning key civil rights rulings, that they did not want to be portrayed as racist as a result of rehashing these old wounds. Here's the relevant excerpt from the 2007 edition of the book (pp. 259-61), starting with Bronner quoting Pat Caddell, pollster and campaign adviser for Joe Biden, who was running for President and chairing the hearings on Bork as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"When I saw the data, I said, 'We're going to beat the shit out of this guy,'" Caddell remembered. "To see the reaction of white southerners afraid to go back on civil rights was overwhelming. I am a white southerner and I felt this stuff, but I had never seen it so dramatically demonstrated."

Caddell had his assistant, Michael Donilon--younger brother of Tom Donilon, Biden's campaign adviser--write up their conclusions from the poll. in a memo dated September 9 Donilon wrote that the conventional wisdom regarding white southern support for Bork was "just plain wrong." He said the incorrect assumption was based on three misconceptions: firstly, that Bork already enjoyed great support in the South; secondly that white southerners had dramatically different views regarding the Supreme Court from the rest of the country; and thirdly, that as southern whites learned more about Bork, they would become more supportive of his nomination. On the last point, Donilon wrote: "In fact, the potential for the development of intense opposition to Bork is perhaps greater in the South than in any other region.

"The reason for this is threefold: Bork poses the risk of reopening race-relation battles which have been fought and put to rest; Bork flouts the southern tradition of populism; and ... Bork poses a challenge to a very strong pro-privacy sentiment among southern voters."

[...]

The data were striking. Of white southerners polled, 62 percent said they were less inclined to support Bork upon hearing that "he has strongly criticized most of the landmark decisions protecting civil rights and individual liberties." Moreover, 68 percent of white southerners said they were less inclined to support Bork upon hearing that the NAACP opposed him. The same percentage was also less inclined to support him because Bork opposed "a decision striking down a poll tax requirement for voting." Bork's 1963 opposition to the public accommodations law pushed to 77 the percentage of southern whites less inclined to support him. The numbers were similar when constitutional privacy and pro-big business questions were asked.

[...]

Bork's opponents had so successfully framed the issue, had so effectively "turned back the clock" for the debate that the natural wellspring of Bork support--white southerners--was dry. Southerners perceived the nomination as racially divisive and so a threat to their peace and prosperity. No matter what racial resentment many southern whites still harbored, they recoiled at the prospect of reviving tghe period of intense racial tension.

Tom Griscom, White House communications director during the Bork battle, explained why the opposition was so effective in the South, lamenting: "They resurrected the sixties because they knew our people would react back. That's where we got into trouble. There are so many people from the part of the country I'm from--the South--who don't like being tagged racists. We've worn that tag for too long as far as I'm concerned. We don't want to reopen those wounds. We don't want to live that again. We've passed that. please don't make us go through it again. The sensitivity is, more among whites in the South than anywhere else."

Just as Southern Whites 20 years ago -- including conservatives and (especially) moderates -- did not want to come off as racists as a result of a replaying of the civil rights battles of two decades prior, White voters in the South today -- and voters across the country, for that matter -- don't want to be treated as racists by elite Beltway consultants telling their clients to make the 2008 campaign about Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers and other related issues. As I said last week, these tactics undertaken by Republicans and Republican-allied groups were miserable failures, with the Democrats winning in some of the most conservative, GOP-leaning districts in the country, and they're bound to fail in the future as well. America is a better place than that and American voters deserve better.