The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War.

• Author: Meacham, Jon

My favorite moment of the 1992 campaign--a brief scene that went largely unremarked upon--came one sunny afternoon in late September. At the time, I was a reporter for The Chattanooga Times and President Bush, panicked by the possibility that his rival all-Southern Democrat ticket might break the solid GOP South, was scurrying around the region. At one airport rally after another, his voice ringing with ridicule, Bush thumped Clinton's Arkansas record. In an appeal to a caricature of Southern life, the President portrayed Clinton as nothing less than the enemy of beer, sports, and trailers. "Governor Clinton," Bush charged, "raised the gas tax. He raised the tax on mobile homes. For you ESPN watchers, he raised the tax on cable TV. And for good measure, he even raised the tax on beer."

Bush's frantic pitch was an obvious attempt to bring out the worst in a certain kind of Southerner. Nevertheless, Clinton, a son of the region, was never able to answer with an appeal to the best in the Southern character. That's striking, and important, because Clinton, with his drawl and his Ivy League credentials (insecure Southerners love the Ivies), should have been liberalism's best hope of selling again in the Sunbelt. But it didn't work--and certainly hasn't in the ensuing three years.

In part this is true for reasons that are peculiarly Southern. You might have thought Clinton's rise to power from a poor state would have inspired a kind of tribal pride. The proper analogy here would be the enormous pleasure Catholics--who, like Southerners, were a notoriously insecure lot--took in John Kennedy's carnpaign, election, and presidency. What is crucially different is that Kennedy made a point of appealing to the best in his people--not only fellow Catholics, of course, but all Americans--and generating loyalty by conducting himself as a graceful and thoughtful president.

Clinton has not pulled that off. To be sure, he had a lot to overcome in the minds of his fellow Southerners: This is a region that thought 1976 would redeem it and the memory of Jimmy Carter's implosion is still painfully fresh. To put that humiliation away, Clinton had to be more Atticus Finch than Boss Hogg, and he has been exactly the opposite. From leering remarks about Astroturf in his truck bed to his boxer rebellion on MTV, there has been too little dignity and too much down-home.

Given the South's continuing domination of national politics, this is spectacularly unlucky for...