HOW HE SEES IT Should Dems 'let South float out to sea'?

By JOHN HALL
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- Many moons ago, Sen. Barry Goldwater suggested we should cut off the eastern seaboard and "let it float out to sea." Shudders of horror and exasperation went up from Boston to New York.
Goldwater was only being provocative in a Saturday Evening Post interview in 1963. But indeed northeastern Republican liberals were read out of the Republican Party's inner councils over the next few decades.
Now, something close to the Goldwater solution is being suggested for Democrats and the South.
A new book has been published which suggests that the Democratic Party should concentrate henceforth on the states of the Northeast, the West coast and the Great Lakes -- Metro America as its authors call it.
"The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America" says the new Democratic base should include Florida and perhaps Virginia, but no other Southern state.
The book was written by John Sperling, a labor organizer turned billionaire education entrepreneur, in collaboration with a group of economic analysts mainly from the West.
The general theme is that the Republican Party has dominated states "of low wages, subsidies, religious zealotry and social rigidity" in the South, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and the mountain West.
These 25 states, wrote Sperling, are "dominated by a mostly rural, conservative, intolerant white male political leadership (though many have large poor minority populations) for whom social services, public education and economic and cultural change are more worrisome than welcome." They have run "rough shod over the values and agenda of the Metro majority who live in more urban, economically prosperous and culturally diverse Metro urban-suburban area."
Sperling argues that "simply for survival as a major party, the Democrats have no choice but to adopt Metro America as its base if America 'as we know it' is to continue as a secular Republic."
No responsible Democratic Party official is publicly taking that position now.
Early in the campaign season, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts suggested that a Democrat could win the White House without the South. But he quickly backpedaled and picked a North Carolinian, Sen. John Edwards, as his running mate.
The idea has been kicking around certain Democratic circles for a long time. Some have called it the "the Western strategy" or the "Coastal/Great Lakes strategy," but the notion that a Democrat can be elected president without a national campaign, bypassing Dixie, cowboy country and the breadbasket has been discussed for a while.
Limited experience
I talked with Sperling by phone from San Francisco last week and asked him how he could ignore the fact that Democrats haven't been able to mount a winning presidential campaign without the South. Sperling acknowledged his only experience in the South was couple of years in the military service in Louisiana and Texas.
"All I wanted to do was get out of there," he said.
He admitted he liked Austin and College Station, Texas, during recent visits.
But Democrats ought to select their presidential contenders from the North, he insisted, even though Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were the party's only recent successful nominees.
Clinton, he said, weakened the Democratic Party by "triangulating" its principles with conservatives, and the result was a loss of control of Congress in 1994.
The only way for Democrats to recover, he said, was to play to its core strength on the coasts and in the Great Lakes.
Sperling said he would let Virginia into his "Metro" club because it is a "bifurcated" state whose enormous growth in its wealthy northern Washington suburbs is overcoming rural domination. Florida, he said, also is close to becoming a solid Metro Democratic state because of Miami's growth as a true Latin American capital, more than just a Cuban center.
There is much in the Sperling book that is worthwhile, including chapters on income transfers to Republican states through subsidies for agriculture and industry. But abandoning an entire region is losing politics, at least for the presidency.
X John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service.