REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Southern Discomfort
Judicial filibusters aren't helping Democrats in Dixie.
So much for the notion that the California recall of Gray Davis presaged a national revolt against incumbents. Tuesday's vote turned out to be typical of off-year elections, with the consolidation of longtime partisan regional trends.
Republicans have good reason to whistle Dixie. They picked up two more statehouses down South and are leading in Louisiana's runoff next week. The victories in Mississippi and Kentucky come on the heels of gubernatorial wins last year in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. If the GOP prevails in Louisiana, it will hold nine of 12 Southern statehouses and 29 nationwide. Sixty percent of Americans soon will live in states run by Republicans.
Democrats found more solace in the Northeast, their main national bastion. In Philadelphia, the Republican challenger was running neck-to-neck with incumbent Mayor John Street until an FBI bug was found in Hizzoner's office and suddenly he was lionized as the target of a national right-wing conspiracy. Mr. Street was resoundingly re-elected.
Voters also cemented the Democratic majority in the New Jersey legislature. Republicans had tried to pin local property tax increases and "education cuts" on Democrats. But Democratic Governor James McGreevey had kept his pledge not to raise income or sales taxes and voters knew the GOP had left him with a budget mess. The lesson for New Jersey Republicans is to stop trying to sound like Democrats.
As for 2004 portents, Mississippi and Kentucky are of course "red states," meaning that President Bush carried them in 2000. But Tuesday's outcomes can't make Democrats feel good about their prospects next year, when Senate seats they now hold will be open in North and South Carolina, Florida and Georgia.
Pinning their hopes on the formerly slow economy may also need rethinking. In Kentucky, Democrats tried to link GOP candidate Ernie Fletcher to the "Bush economy." On the party Web site, a cartoon character called "Fletcher Bush," the "job terminator," kept a tally of the number of state jobs lost. In Mississippi, incumbent Democrat Ronnie Musgrove assailed former lobbyist Haley Barbour's close personal ties to Mr. Bush and tried to tar him with supporting Nafta. Another bust.
Democrats may also want to reconsider the wisdom of their Senate judicial-filibuster strategy. Republicans in Mississippi made much of the Democratic filibuster of appeals-court nominee Charles Pickering Sr., a highly regarded Mississippian who has been unfairly labeled a racist. A Senate vote on ending the filibuster, conveniently timed for last Thursday, was big news in his home state.
Two other Southerners are on the filibuster list: Alabama Attorney General William Pryor and Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen. A third, Janice Brown, an African-American now sitting on the California Supreme Court, is the daughter of a sharecropper from rural Alabama. National liberal Democrats claim these popular Southerners are too "extreme," which is another way of saying "drop dead" to the entire South. On Tuesday's evidence, the South is returning the compliment.
