The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected.

• Author: Meacham, Jon

Earl Black, Merle Black. Harvard, $29.95. Frustrated by federal orders and intervention, Louisiana Governor Earl Long once shrugged hopelessly: What can a man do now that the feds have the bomb? Black and Black offer a belated answer to Long's question: The feds have the bomb, but the South has the votes.

In convincing detail, the Blacks dramatize the great new fact of presidential politics: The South, composed of the 11 slave states that seceded in 1860 and 1861, is the richest electoral prize in the nation. Solidly Democratic just 40 years ago, the South is now just as solidly Republican in presidential elections. This book is a clear and credible survey of that phenomenon, and it's especially welcome in a year of generalizations about "the Bubba vote." The Blacks' most important point here is that Bubba--a white voter with patriotic sympathies and a distrust of Washington--is everywhere, and the Democrats had better pay attention to him.

The Democrats now enter the presidential campaign with a base of only Minnesota and the District of Columbia--2 percent of the electoral vote. Thirty-nine states now usually go Republican, including all 11 southern states. The South controls 54 percent of a winning electoral majority; in four of the last five elections, victorious Republicans have swept the South's electoral votes. In other words, the presidency is now the Republicans' to lose, and the South is their greatest area of strength.

So what do these southerners, whose wariness of Washington has now spread nationwide, believe? Core white Republicans made up 44 percent of the total southern electorate in 1988. "They feel exceptionally positive toward southerners, conservatives, the military, the importance of religion, all symbolic representations of the established order, as well as toward Republicans," write the authors. And that's not simply a provincial profile: Core white Republicans accounted for 41 percent of the northern electorate (the Blacks use "North" to describe any state outside of the old Confederacy) the same year. The GOP began with those blocs and built stunning majorities, North and South.

The matter of race is inescapable. Working- and middle-class whites, North and South, have left the Democrats believing that the Great...