Foghorn Leghorn Meets an Owl
GREENVILLE, S.C.--It's way
too late for the South Carolina Senate race to be a fight for the political
soul of the South. (That soul is held under lock and key at Republican Party
headquarters.) But the South Carolina race still probably ranks as the most
important Senate contest of 1998. It is important not because Democrats must
hold the seat to prevent a filibuster-proof Republican majority, though they
must. It is important because it's absolutely, positively the last stand for
the Democratic Party in Dixie. The Democrats know they can't be the majority
party down here. The South Carolina race tests whether they can be any kind of
party.
If Sen.
Fritz Hollings cannot hold his seat--if a powerful, intelligent,
pork-barreling, 32 year incumbent, supported by the full force and bankroll of
the national Democratic Party and opposed by a little-known challenger, cannot
win--then the Democratic Party might as well fold and flee North. So I have
come to Greenville to witness the dogfight between Hollings and his Republican
challenger, Rep. Bob Inglis. They are holding their fourth debate tonight at
the local NBC affiliate's studio. Hollings barely won in 1992, and this year's
race promises to be just as tight--Republican polls have Inglis trailing by
only three points, Democratic polls by slightly more.
The race is as nasty as it is close. The Republican Party
and the Hollings campaign have blanketed the state's airwaves with marginally
true and thoroughly vicious attack ads. And Hollings, who is temperamentally
incapable of controlling his tongue, has already called Inglis "a goddamn
skunk," "a fraud," "a rascal," "an opportunist," "a hypocrite," and--my
favorite--"oozing and goozing."
You could
not invent two politicians with more antithetical worldviews than Hollings and
Inglis: This is the Old New South vs. the New New South, the New Deal vs. the
Gingrich Revolution, the good-timer vs. the choirboy.
At 76, Hollings remains the caricature he has
always been. When he enters the studio, it is as though God has arrived. He
looks absurdly distinguished--though his magnificent white mane is starting to
thin. His Southern accent is so impenetrable that during his short-lived but
entertaining 1984 presidential run, he was introduced by Ted Kennedy as "the
first non-English speaking candidate for president." Hollings is arrogant,
rude, vituperative, and overbearing, but he is an utterly ingratiating
politician. As governor in the early '60s, while his colleagues in Alabama and
Arkansas were leading the nation to the brink of civil war over civil rights,
Hollings guided South Carolina--very slowly, it must be admitted--toward
peaceful integration. As a senator, he has been an inveterate distributor of
pork and a fierce, successful advocate for the modernization of South Carolina.
Hollings was an architect of the New South, establishing South Carolina's
network of technical colleges and avidly recruiting manufacturers to its
low-tax, anti-union confines.
The
owlish, 39-year-old Inglis has none of Hollings' presence. He has been
described, perfectly, as the kid in your fourth-grade class who reminded the
teacher to collect the homework. Elected to the House in 1992 with strong
Christian Coalition support, Inglis out-Gingriches the Gingrichites. He hates
government and politics as much as Hollings likes them. He is a Man of
Principles. He refuses PAC money. He chooses to sleep in his Washington office
rather than rent a D.C. apartment (proving either his loyalty to the Palmetto
State or his cheapness). He's a term limits bore. He calls himself,
irritatingly, a "Young Turk." Inglis is so principled, in fact, that he votes
against funding pork projects in his own district. In one famous case,
Inglis helped kill federal funding for a needed highway, requiring the state to
build a toll road instead. He has not been forgiven.
By any rational calculus, Inglis trounces Hollings in
tonight's debate. The forum is being broadcast to Greenville and its environs,
which are among the fastest growing regions in the country. The area is
prosperous, Christian, and economically conservative. Inglis represents this
district in the House, and he knows how to appeal to it. The fast-growing
"Upcountry," as it's called, is the new voting engine of the state: If
Greenvillians come out and vote, Inglis will almost certainly beat
Hollings.
To this
conservative audience, Inglis touts his anti-pork philosophy, insisting that he
won't "play by the old system of bringing home a little money and expecting
everyone to fall at my feet and call me Savior." He repeats his call for
President Clinton to resign, an extremely popular position in South Carolina,
and castigates Hollings for voting with the president. He lectures on the need
to privatize Social Security (he refers to the "miracle of compounding" with
the same reverence that most Christians reserve for loaves and fishes).
Inglis, knowing of Hollings' vitriol, proposed
a "Contract for a Courteous Campaign" that would have required candidates to
warn opponents in advance about attacks and to minimize negative ads and race
baiting. Hollings rejected it several weeks ago. Inglis gets fabulous mileage
out of this, doing a brilliant "more in sorrow than in anger" act that casts
him as too horrified even to repeat Hollings' slurs. "Was it distinguished to
call me a 'g.d. skunk'? Was it courteous to say 'kiss my blank'? ...Was it
courteous to refer to black South Carolinians in a way I can't describe?"
(Glossary: "g.d." = "goddamn"; "blank" = "fanny"; I have no idea what the last
refers to.)
Hollings,
meanwhile, looks bored with the entire event. This is his sixth Senate
campaign, and he never liked retail politics to begin with. He's slightly
frailer and less focused than he used to be, and his answers wander away from
the studio audience's questions. His off-the-cuff style seems amateurish next
to Inglis' polished mini-essays. He often ignores the camera while he's
talking. (Inglis, by contrast, all but jams his head into the lens.)
But after 45 minutes of this, I begin to suspect that
Hollings is being cannier than he lets on. Hollings is betting on old-time
Democratic politics, such as they still are in South Carolina. He is counting
on a huge black turnout and the last few yellow-dog Democrats. He doesn't want
to engage Inglis in some lofty debate about principles. The more he contrasts
himself with the cool, schoolmarmish Inglis, the better. All Hollings wants to
do is remind people that he's their Fritz and that he got them that road they
needed.
So
Hollings embraces Inglis' charges that he's a pork-barreler: "He calls it pork.
This is government." He has spent 32 years wangling roads and airports and
sewers for South Carolina, and he doesn't mind reminding voters about it.
Inglis' spokesman derisively calls this Hollings' "I got you ... I got you ...
I got you ... I got you ... I got you ..." speech. But it works. Hollings
paints Inglis' obsession with principles as a handicap, mocking his refusal to
accept home-district goodies: "What have you done for your district for six
years other than whine and complain and holler 'pork'?"
When Inglis vows to serve only two Senate
terms, Hollings crows about his experience. He says that Inglis would be "a
whisper" in the Senate, a lame duck as soon as he took office. (There is
something bravely contrarian about Inglis campaigning in favor of term limits
in the state of Hollings and Sen. Strom Thurmond. South Carolina likes
re-electing people: Between Hollings and Thurmond, South Carolina has, what,
8,000 years of Senate seniority? Speaking of Thurmond, he plays a hilarious
role in this campaign. Both candidates cite him as their model. To name just
one example, Hollings uses Thurmond's silence on the Lewinsky scandal to excuse
his own silence. Since when did the practices of confused, incompetent Strom
become the guide for senatorial behavior?)
Inglis
has more ideas, more energy, and--God knows--more principles, and South
Carolina's young Christian conservatives are his for the next generation.
Still, all the older South Carolinians I talked to at the debate and in
Greenville, without exception, plan to vote for Fritz. The loyalty strategy may
succeed for Hollings. It won't, of course, succeed for any other Southern
Democrat. There are no Democratic senators left in the South who command the
kind of affection that Hollings does or who have compiled his 50 year record.
But Democrats in South Carolina and in the national party don't really care
how Fritz wins. If he wins at all, that will be miracle enough.
Tomorrow: the bizarre South Carolina governor's race, which proves that for
the Democratic Party, there is indeed a fate worse than death.
