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Advancing Progressive Ideas

Critical Analysis: Foxes in the Henhouse

"Always remember that there are two kinds of people in Washington, D.C.: those who can count and those who lose." In the foreword to Foxes in the Henhouse, former Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska) recounts this piece of wisdom from one of the most effective legislative figures of the 20th century, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Texas Democrat. Dave "Mudcat" Saunders parlays Speaker Rayburn's wisdom into a succinct statement of what he feels is the contemporary Democratic Party's biggest problem: "They can't count."

Foxes in the Henhouse seeks to remind Democrats across the nation why being able to count is important in thinking about the party's national political future; in short, their argument is that a path to a durable national majority runs through the states of the old Confederacy and the Midwest and that the party, its administrators and its office seekers have to do a better job of understanding the South and Midwest...and translating this understanding into policies and action...if this durable majority is ever to take hold.

Steve Jarding (Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) and Dave "Mudcat" Saunders (campaign adviser to Mark Warner, Bob Graham and John Edwards) address a sore spot in national Democratic circles with the publication of Foxes in the Henhouse. Many Democrats outside of the South have all but written off our region for the better part of a decade; the few remaining non-Southern Democrats that still believed in a meaningful Democratic presence in the South were rendered silent with the Republican sweep of retiring moderate Democratic Senators from across the region in the 2004 election cycle.

I wanted to review Foxes in the Henhouse as my first of several books because the internal debate over this Republicanization of the South is a personal bone I have to pick with some Democrats from outside of the region. I've encountered many who are ready to throw all of us in the former Confederate states under the train because they can't be bothered to understand the South. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Oregon and California and more times than I care to remember online, I've talked and emailed with people who all ask some variety of the same question: "What in the hell is wrong with you people?!?" I'm sure any Texas Democrat who has politically-active friends in other states knows what I'm talking about in this regard.

Jarding and Saunders answer this question by talking about the Democratic message as it ought to be and contrasting it with the Democratic message as the Republicans have framed it. Along these lines, Foxes in the Henhouse is divided into four thematic sections: How we got here, where we are, appreciating the situation and going on the counter attack. In the first section, how we got here, the authors discuss the New Deal, the Great Society, the well-worn landscape of the Republican "Southern Strategy," Barry Goldwater's 1964 bid for the Presidency, Richard Nixon's successful 1968 Presidential run and the cultural realignment of the Republican Party around appealing to race in the South as mastered by Lee Atwater.

After explaining how the foxes got into the henhouse, Jarding and Saunders muster a laundry list of demographic information on rural America: Roughly 21% of the population lives in rural America and that percentage is shrinking as rural areas lose young people to suburban and urban environments. Rural America suffers from greater rates of poverty than do other areas of America; poor public education cripples future generations in rural America; little to no access to health care and few economic opportunities add fuel to the migration from rural America. The burden of all these institutional and structural problems is born by children in rural America, where 16% of households with children are deemed "food insecure" by the USDA. The percentages of children living in poverty in rural areas of the former Confederate states outstrip the numbers for children living in poverty in urban areas in the same states. 20% of rural citizens in America are considered elderly (age 65 or older) and more live in poverty than do the elderly in urban areas.

When the reader is finished with the the previous section, they are left feeling a bit like they were just steamrolled and burned out of their homes by George W. Bush's reenactment of Sherman's March to the Sea. Jarding and Saunders begin what I think is the most important...and problematic...piece of their book: Why Democrats need to appreciate the culture of rural America, the South and the Midwest. The central figure in this part of the book is Bubba. No, I'm not kidding. Bubba is the straw man Jarding and Saunders tell their readers the Democrats must reach out to and must understand. Bubba loves God, guns, Old Glory and NASCAR. Again, I'm not kidding. In addition to needing to better understand Bubba, Democrats need to appreciate the role of bluegrass music and college football in Bubba's world so that they can speak to him where he lives. The last thing that Democrats ought to appreciate about Bubba is that he loves hunting and finishing as much as bluegrass and college football.

After describing Bubba and what he likes for the reader, the authors lay out five simple lessons for Democrats to take to heart in rural America, the South and the Midwest: "Learn how to count " (there's lots of electoral college votes in these areas), "define yourself and define your opponent - not the other way around", "show some passion!", "when someone assassinates your character, retaliate!" and "talk to people where they live - about their lives, their fears and their interests." I don't know of too many Democrats who would disagree on four of these five points no matter what their ZIP code is or whether they're drinking a local microbrew or some Natty Light. Defining yourself and then defining your opponent, showing some passion, retaliating for being defamed and talking to voters where they live and work about their lives are all things I and many folks I know have discussed and yelled at TV sets during debates. These aren't things that would only go over well in rural America; these are things that will go over well with Democrats and undecided voters everywhere. Jarding and Saunders then close Foxes in the Henhouse with some policy recommendations for Democrats to reach out to voters in rural America, the South and the Midwest while simultaneously showing the Republicans to be the great betrayers of these same people. I'll revisit the "learn how to count" lesson in my criticisms.

I have two criticisms of this book. First, I understand that one of the easiest criticisms to make is to blast an author (or authors, in this case) for not covering a particular topic or discussing the impact of a particular phenomena that the reviewer feels is important but that is, in some way, outside of the scope of the work being reviewed. I feel like a bit of a heel for this reason, but I do think that this is a point that is still overlooked and undervalued at the national level by the Democratic Party and Democratic activists (including Jarding and Saunders): Control of state legislatures and building robust state parties. The redistricting that gutted the Texas Congressional delegation of long-serving conservative Democrats in the 2004 election cycle did not come from the White House or from the U.S. Congress or from the Republican National Committee; it came from the Republican Texas state legislature in Austin. Nationally, Democrats were quick to blame the not-indicted-yet Tom DeLay and Karl Rove, but their desires would have been meaningless if it weren't for the Texas GOP's own Tom, Speaker of the House Tom Craddick.

Let's take a quick tour of the partisan makeup of the two fastest-growing states in the South and the two slowest-growing states in the South (for the 2005-2006 year, offset for emphasis):

Georgia: The make up of the Georgia state House for the 2005-2006 session was 76 D, 103 R; the make up of the Georgia state Senate for the 2005-2006 session was 22 D, 34 R (2005-2006 growth 2.47% (4th nationally), projected to pick up 2 House seats after the 2010 Census).

Louisiana: The current make up of the Louisiana state House is 60 D, 41 R; the current make up of the Louisiana state Senate is 24 D, 15 R (2005-2006 growth -5.12% (50th nationally), projected to lose 1 House seat after 2010).

Mississippi: The current make up of the Mississippi state House is 73 D, 47 R; the current make up of the Mississippi state Senate is 27 D, 25 R (2005-2006 growth .07% (44th nationally), projected to hold 4 House seats after the 2010 Census).

Texas: The current make up of the Texas state House is 69 D, 81 R; the current make up of the Texas state Senate is 11 D, 20 R (2005-2006 growth 2.46% (5th nationally), projected to pick up 2 House seats after the 2010 Census).

Georgia, Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina were all in the Top 10 fastest growing states in the 2005-2006 period; Louisiana and Mississippi were in the Bottom 10 fastest growing states in the 2005-2006 period. As a region, the South is growing faster than any other region in the United States, but that growth is concentrated in certain areas of certain states, not dispersed across the region as a whole. Specifically, growth is the greatest in suburban and exurban areas around metropolitan areas across the region, places like Collin County, Denton County, Fort Bend County and Williamson County in Texas and similar counties around Atlanta, Charlotte, Charleston, Orlando and Tampa Bay. Once you reconsider the map of rural America that Jarding and Saunders lay out in these terms, I would argue that Democrats don't need to learn how to count, but rather we need to do a better job of counting the right things. Here's a related frightening fact: as of February 22, 2007, the Georgia Democratic Party was out of operating funds and facing a reactionary state lege full of rabid fundamentalists who view Georgia as their personal experiment in social conservatism.

I like to think of myself as a pragmatic progressive, someone who wants to win the political wars but understands that Southern Democrats have to pick our battles at this point in time if we are to win in the bigger picture. As a pragmatic progressive, I also understand that contemporary politics is expensive and that you're not going to even hold onto your current districts if you're broke, much less make up the kind of ground that Democrats need to in the state legislatures in Georgia, Texas and Florida and make no mistake about it, if we are to flush the foxes from the henhouse, we're going to have to start from the state district level and work our way up.

In weaving together my state level issues with Foxes in the Henhouse, redistricting in Texas, the state of the Georgia Democratic Party's finances and the near- and long-term electoral futures of Southern Democrats, I think that a better way to approach the problems we face from Texas to Florida than tinkering with our issue orientation is to ground this discussion of issue orientation within a larger pragmatic plan of financial solvency for state parties, building our state Democratic infrastructures across the region, building regional information-focused organizations that connect everyone from state legislators on up through U.S. Senators, focusing on regaining control of state Houses and Senates. My idea of a first step in this process is that we need to keep more of our Southern Democratic money in our states, whether it goes to state Democratic Parties or state House and state Senate candidates. I don't doubt the sincerity of organizations like MoveOn and ACT, but they're not going to win state legislature races for us. We need to put our money toward our most pressing needs, and in my estimation those needs are in building robust local and state party infrastructures and winning at the state legislative level.

My second criticism is more of a meta-criticism with the "telling" of the South, the Midwest and rural America, in particular the way that the South is portrayed in Foxes in the Henhouse. Were someone not engaged with current demographics and dabbling in state-level politics across the region to pick up this book for a read, they would come away with the idea that the South is a culturally and demographically monolithic bloc populated by Bubba, his fishing buddies and his gal. The casual reader would probably come away thinking that we're essentially all stereotypes, Larry the Cable Guys and Daisy Dukes running around a vast rural area stretching from New Mexico to the Atlantic shooting anything that runs, crawls, slithers or flies while flying the Stars and Bars right next to Old Glory while growling "git 'er dun" in between shotgunning our Natty Lights.

The truth of the new political geography of the South is that it's not Bubba that is running the show; it's his cousin Bobby with the new house in Round Rock, two kids he barely ever sees because he works so much, with a health care plan that covers less and less of the costs of his family's health, leveraged to his eyeballs in credit card debt and an adjustable rate mortgage on his house that is adjusting in the wrong direction for his budget. Bobby is almost certainly a member of the local megachurch, he is probably a NASCAR fan but he most likely doesn't hunt and probably can't afford to go to college football games.

The truth can be seen in the brief quantitative snapshot of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas above: "The South" is a traditional geographic region, cognitive shorthand for how we organize the old Confederacy in our minds. At the same time, the South is also a region of very different dimensions. Most of the growth in Florida, Georgia and Texas is centered around booming exurban areas that are chewing up farm land and pasture and spitting out shopping malls and master planned housing developments faster than you can say "NASCAR Dads." While I don't doubt for a minute that Saunders' work in organizing Sportsmen for Warner and getting Warner's campaign to sponsor a NASCAR ride were key in mobilizing just enough of rural Virginia for him to win, I don't think the same mobilization of hunters and NASCAR fans is much of a peg to hang your hat on in the suburbs and exurbs around Dallas, Austin, Houston, Atlanta, Orlando and Miami. These are places that, by definition, are full of people who are not from wherever they live; while I know plenty of people who like NASCAR in the exurbs around Dallas, I don't know that many who would ever pick up a gun and go shoot whatever is in season at the time (for the record, I am a deer hunter).

It is in this second point where I think Foxes in the Henhouse ultimately misses its mark despite the best intentions of its authors. While Jarding & Saunders lay out a solid ethical and empirical case for why the national party shouldn't ignore the South, Midwest and rural America and offer policy prescriptions to help the party develop a better message, it ignores the complexity of the New South in favor of trafficking in stereotypes about the Old South and extrapolating from Virginia to the entire region. I think that DNC Chairman Howard Dean's advocacy of his 50 State Strategy for returning the Democratic Party to a truly national party is the first step to addressing the Democratic Party's structural issues in the South, Midwest and across rural America. The 50 State Strategy is a beginning, but we simply can't count on national organizations from within and from without the Democratic Party to help us; we need to start helping ourselves by keeping our money where our interests lie instead of sending so much of it out of our states and region to well-meaning organizations that aren't going to help Southern Democrats. Ultimately, I think that is where we start winning more battles on the path toward eventually winning the political wars in the big picture.

My next book review will look at the well-argued counterpoint to Jarding & Saunders in the form of Thomas Schaller's Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.

Jarding, Steve and Dave "Mudcat" Saunders (2006). Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run 'em Out. New York: Simon & Schuester.

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