RALEIGH — Sen. John Edwards has accurately diagnosed one of the main challenges facing the national Democratic Party. I just wonder whether he is the man that can meet that challenge.
Speaking to the Bar Association of San Francisco, an unlikely venue for his message, Edwards argued that the party would not be competitive for either president or the Congress if it failed to address the concerns of rural and small-town voters that have been trending Republican over the past several election cycles.
“We cannot treat the rest of America as a place we fly over between New York to California,” he told the crowd (many of whom, I am betting, spend a fair amount of time flying right over those exotic lands).
Edwards is right, of course. Al Gore would have won the Electoral College in 2000 had he pulled just a few more rural and small-town votes in places like West Virginia or his own home state of Tennessee. In 2002, Democrats got smoked in congressional districts outside of major urban areas, and lost some Senate seats, in places like Minnesota and Georgia, because the party’s candidates didn’t connect well with rural voters.
The New York Times just ran a two-part series on the political parties in which these issues were explored in greater depth. The piece on the national Democrats, which we linked on Carolina Journal Online Thursday, quoted numerous party leaders and activists making a similar point about the need to appeal to a broader, less ideological base of voters outside of special-interest groups and city dwellers.
The problem is, I don’t see how Edwards himself offers a solution to the Democrats’ dilemma. Yes, he’s from the South. And yes, he’s from a humble background. But the senator’s positions on a host of issues important to this sliver of voters — especially in areas of social and family policy — lie far to the left of real Democratic moderates with rural appeal such as Senate colleagues Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Zell Miller of Georgia, and even Evan Bayh of Indiana, a former governor.
At the San Francisco event, for example, Edwards touted the usual liberal line on gay rights and abortion. Perhaps you agree with him. Perhaps you don’t. But surely no one can reasonably believe that accentuating such positions is the way for Democrats to make inroads into small-town America.
It’s not that these voters are uniformly conservative. They’re not. But they are disproportionately religious and predisposed towards traditional views of family and children. Much of Edwards’ economic populism, though I find it profoundly wrong-headed from a policy perspective, is marketable to swing voters in rural areas and small towns. But I wonder if they will look past Edwards’ liberal leanings on social issues and allow themselves to see him — a wealthy trial lawyer who is obviously comfortable chatting up Bay Area secularists — as one of them.
We’ll see.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.