Dana Blankenhorn

What's Wrong with South Carolina?

The following is based on my 4 years covering southern politics for Voic.us and nearly 35 years living in the southern cities of Houston and Atlanta.

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We're rednecks, We're rednecks

We don't know our ass from a hole in the ground

We're rednecks, we're rednecks.

And we're keeping the niggers down.

-- Randy Newman

What's wrong with South Carolina is the same thing that's wrong with the rest of the South, but most especially Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, which with South Carolina make up the "Deep South."

The southern power structure is racist.

I don't mean here that southern politicians are racist, or southerners are, if by that you mean they believe blacks are inferior to them, or even different. The vast majority know better than that.

When I say they're racist, I mean they practice power as a zero-sum game based on skin color. Politics is defined by race. If you're serious about political power you can either play on the majority (white) side or confine yourself to the minority.

Minorities have power in the South where they have majorities, or near-majorities. Many southern cities like my own hometown of Atlanta are run by black folks, as are counties such as DeKalb or Clayton. There are black congress-critters like John Lewis and Jim Clyburn whose voting records are very similar to northern Democratic norms.

But whites and blacks can add. They know that where whites are the majority, whether statewide or locally, whites are going to get what they want. And vice versa. This is the reality, and it has defined southern politics since the Nixon era, when whites started moving toward the Republicans. Once a state figured out the game -- as Georgia did in 2002 -- there could be no going back.

Power means patronage. It means control over contracts. It has nothing to do with parties or ideologies. Cobb County Republicans don't act that much differently than DeKalb County Democrats -- they just talk differently about it.

Now that we have the lay of the land, let's talk about the specific case of South Carolina.

The Robocall Campaign

Last year the election was everywhere.

Even though Georgia was considered a backwater, a reliable red state filled with Angry White Men, there was enormous excitement. Both parties worked hard, yard signs were everywhere, there were rallies and people making phone calls.

Not this year. Atlanta just had its mayoral election and no one I knew cared. It's not just that a run-off was expected. There was a total lack of yard signs, few people talked about it, and I felt undecided almost before walking into the booth.

Instead of buying TV ads or hiring people to canvass, all the campaigns this year relied on robocalls, recorded messages that seemed to come from every area code around (and some that do not exist) but were in fact tapes with happy voices telling us who they were and who they were voting for.

Which is another thing about the campaign that struck me. All the calls were upbeat, relentlessly so. I wasn't told who to vote against. I was told "I'm someone you should trust and here is who to vote for."

The result was sad because turnout was low and real issues were not discussed. Everyone was rattling about crime, but the crime rate is not that high. There have been some spectacular incidents, acts of desperation by young, bored, pathetic people. But the gangs are in the suburbs now.

The real problem with Atlanta is that we pretend to be a great city but we are in fact a small one. There are just 500,000 people here, even with gentrification. We're like Tucson or Portland, but for decades we've pretended to be Philadelphia or Chicago, because we're at the center of a metro area that has grown to 6.6 million people. The efforts of Cobb and Gwinnett Counties to wrest control of the center from Atlanta have brought them Atlanta's poor, its crime and congestion. Government leaders there ignore the rot, and fearful whites move even further-out -- to Henry County in the South, Paulding County in the northwest, Cherokee County and Forsyth County to the north. They're as ignorant as they always were, so the problems will follow them there.

Good riddance, I say.

Shame of the South: Alabamistan

No American state is so much like the dictatorships of central Asia than Alabama. (Cartoons by J.D. Crowe for the Mobile Register.)

Under Boss Bob Riley, Alabama Republicans have so corrupted the law that it's physically hazardous to be an ambitious Democrat. And if you're a Republican, even the old rule "don't get found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy" is apparently no longer operative.

It has been this way since Riley's first election, in 2002, when Baldwin County officials (all Republicans) staged a recount after all the Democrats had gone home and "found" the 6,000 votes necessary for him to beat incumbent Democrat Don Siegelman.

This was just the start of things for Siegelman, who soon found himself on a Solzhenitsyn-like journey through the world of partisan justice, eventually spending nearly two years in a federal jail. It was, as the blog Firedoglake later wrote, a total frame-up, made possible only by the complete corruption of the federal government -- from Birmingham all the way to the White House.

Allegedly, Siegelman was taking money illegally from Robert Scrushy, CEO of HealthSouth, a sports medicine outfit convicted of fraud the year before he stood trial with Siegelman. But as Scott Horton of Harpers Magazine later learned, Republican operatives were tampering with both the jury and the evidence, having secret meetings with the Judge, and convicting Siegelman through a U.S. Attorney married to a Riley strategist who was (despite her supposed recusal from the case) handling strategy behind the scenes.

Shame of the South: Clayton County

When reformers condemn Georgia's pay to play government under House Speaker Glenn Richardson, they may ask how white voters tolerate it.

The answer, as any white blogger will tell you (and some racists are far from subtle about it), can be summarized in two words.

Clayton County. (To the right, former school board chair Norreese Haynes.)

While the problem of white governance is one of money and political organization, the problem of black governance is one of apathy and political opportunism. You decide which is worse for the prospect of real reform.

Clayton County went from mostly-white to mostly-black in the 1990s, then acquired one of the most dysfunctional governments anywhere. The county as a whole is in the process of going broke, despite having a ton of taxable business property within its boundaries, as well as the Atlanta Airport.

But the real story here, its true shame, is Clayton County's school board.

Shame of the South: Glenn Richardson

That white America retains its racist edge is a fact.

As Dr. Charles Franklin noted recently, even the 2008 Exit Polls show white support for Democrat Barack Obama falling off a cliff once the black population of a state hit 25%.

This defines the Deep South. Blacks vote Democratic, whites Republican. Both sides suffer as a result. Real elections are in the primaries, and all reformers are at a disadvantage as incumbent machines hint (subtly or not) that their efforts at bipartisanship are a form of racial sell-out.

Little has changed since the 1960s, except instead of all-white Democratic machines holding all power we now have two sets of machines, one white and one black. The move was gradual, down the ballot, but once the tipping point was reached in each state the move was both total and irreversible.

In 2002 the tipping point was reached in Georgia. The state's first Republican Governor since Reconstruction, Sonny Perdue, was elected. This caused the state's money power to flip entirely to the Republicans, who took over both houses of the state legislature in 2004.

And instituted their machine.

The leader of that machine, on the House side, is Glenn Richardson. Like the other leaders of the state's Republicans he lives in the Atlanta exurbs. Specifically he lives in Hiram, Georgia, which is in Paulding County, about 25 miles north-by-northwest from Atlanta proper.

Richardson, 52, lives just a few miles north of his birthplace in Douglas County. He is a highly incurious man who operates from self-interest, his own and that of people like him. He got his law degree from Georgia State in Atlanta in 1984 and almost immediately joined a politically-connected law firm for which he is now a name partner. He rose steadily along with his party, winning his legislative seat in 1996. His district is northeast of that held by the late Democratic Speaker Tom Murphy, and while his leadership style is based on the same ruthlessness and bombast, his method for gaining power is quite different.