“President who?” Craig Mathis asked, and the room exploded with laughter. Mathis blushed, fumbled, tried to recoup: he disagreed with Bill Clinton on lots of issues, he said, but you had to give the man credit for trying. Silence. A tough crowd, the Kiwanians of Sylvester, Ga. Of course, almost every crowd is tough for Mathis, who is 32 and the Democratic candidate for Congress from Georgia’s Eighth District. “He’s a nice young man,” Saxby Chambliss, his Republican opponent, told a small crowd – almost all of them nominal Democrats – at a picturesque backwoods fishing camp several nights later, “but soon as he gets elected, he becomes an integral part of the Clinton team.”
And that’s about all that needs to be said. “People around here think Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster,” says one local Democrat, who still supports the president. “They believe everything they hear from Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell. ‘Course Clinton hasn’t made it any easier for himself. He lost them the first week, with gays in the military.”
This is colorful stuff, and not unexpected – but Bill Clinton isn’t the only reason white, moderate Democrats like Craig Mathis are in deep trouble this year. There is another problem: their districts were redrawn, and black voters removed, to create new “minority” congressional seats in 1992. This, to comply with amendments to the Voting Rights Act passed by the Congress 10 years earlier. “The map we drew was sort of like a 3-D movie,” says former state senator Wayne Garner. “Look at it without the glasses and you see two new black districts – but when you put those glasses on, it’s a whole ’nother thing: all these opportunities for Republicans. I kept telling [black legislators] that they were like chickens goin’ to Colonel Sanders’s for dinner, but they wouldn’t listen. They worked with the Republicans. It was charismatic.”
It may also have been illegal. Last week a federal judicial panel threw out the most egregious of the black districts – one that’s splattered like a Rorschach blot from Savannah on the coast, north to Augusta, then farther north and west to Atlanta, clipping off black wards in all of the above. No one knows what happens next, but it’s likely the whole mess will end up in the Supreme Court, along with similar cases from other Southern states. Meanwhile, the chickens are heading to the Colonel’s: blacks won two new seats in 1992. Republicans added three. This year the four Republican incumbents and three black Democrats are considered safe bets for re-election. But three of the four seats held by white, moderate Democrats are in jeopardy. “I can see a day when we don’t have any white Democrats left in our congressional delegation,” says one prominent Georgian.
This is an immediate disaster, obviously, for Democrats – who earned it by acquiescing to black demands for race-based remedies – but there’s also a long-term social price to be paid. A not-so-funny thing happens when blacks are set off into separate electoral districts: politics polarizes – and politicians have an easier time getting themselves elected. They don’t have to struggle to find the common ground between blacks and whites; they can appeal to the worst, most selfish instincts of their constituents (on both sides).
For the past 12 years J. Roy Rowland has held the south-central Georgia seat Craig Mathis hopes to fill. He is pretty candid about the effect reapportionment, which reduced the number of blacks in his district from 36 percent to 21 percent, had on his voting record: “It became more oriented toward a district that had changed. I didn’t vote for the Clinton budget,” he says, “and I might have been inclined to do so in the past.” Rowland retires this year, disgusted. “Am I not capable of representing black people?” he asks. “I find it personally offensive that this took place.”
John Lewis – the Atlanta congressman who was a hero of the civil-rights movement and is one of the more reasonable voices in this endless, awful debate – doesn’t have much sympathy for Rowland. “Many of these white Democrats didn’t do a very good job representing their black constituents,” he says. But will the Republicans who inherit these districts do any better? Will there be more votes for education, health care or any of the other issues Lewis cares about in a Georgia congressional delegation that may go from one Republican (out of 11) in 1990 to six in 1994? “There are some things in life you can’t rationalize,” he says. “Some circles you can’t square.”
And some circles are, sadly, broken. For a time blacks and whites in the South worked together, not just in Congress, but on countless town councils and county commissions. There was a bland, sweet quality to this alliance – Jimmy Carter was its apotheosis – that belied the remarkable changes taking place. Suddenly, white politicians, even some old recalcitrants like George Wallace, had to think about the concerns of black voters if they expected to win office. There was a dialogue, there were negotiations, there were inelegant compromises. That era is over now, a victim of the times – the rise of polarizing issues like crime and morality – but also a result of racial redistricting. “It’s become more a politics of confrontation. We’re giving power to people at the ends of the political spectrum,” says Tommy Coleman, a former mayor of Albany, Ga., elected with black and white votes. “The loss of good will is just appalling. I don’t know what to do about it.” There is, he says, a chill in the air, a growing bitterness. And a sadness, too. The South has been resegregated.
