by Isaac Wright
I was honored this April to address the organizing convention of the Tennessee Democratic Party about the 2016 election cycle – the state I grew up in and the state party I worked at roughly a dozen years ago. It felt like a homecoming of sorts with 200 of the Volunteer State’s most committed Democrats. But it made me take stock of the political evolution in the South I’ve witnessed. On this trip to Spring Hill, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville, I realized that for Southern Democrats, 2016 is the time for revival. Hillary Clinton’s newly announced campaign is our opportunity.
Over the last 15 years, I have lived and worked in Tennessee, Louisiana, Washington D.C., South Carolina, Missouri, and spent the better part of a decade in Arkansas before returning to the nation’s capital.
When I left Tennessee, Democrats held majorities in both chambers of the legislature, we were one of only two Southern states with a Democratic majority in its U.S. House delegation, and we held the Governor’s office. None of that is true today.
In my time in Arkansas, my second home state, Democrats won back the Governor’s office, held all seven constitutional offices, super majorities in both legislative chambers, held both U.S. Senate seats, and a majority of the House delegation. But things have changed dramatically in the Natural State since then.
These choices made in elections have consequences.
What is the difference between Republican leadership and Democratic leadership and what they provide in the South? Under the leadership of then Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe, a Democrat, Arkansas’s public school education rose to 5th in the nation and more than 30,000 new jobs were announced with Beebe’s signature program the Quick Action Closing Fund. But today, Arkansas has fallen to 36th in the same education rankings and Tennessee and Louisiana follow at 37th and 44th in the same report. In February 2015, Tennessee ranked 45th for unemployment and Louisiana ranked 47th according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Our hope for revival — economic and educational — begins with our values.
The South I grew up in is permeated by a sense of community and responsibility to take care of our own, matched with a unique strain of populism: if given a fair playing field and the opportunity, we’ll succeed on our own merits and hard work, and then we’ll do our part to help our neighbors reach their potential, too.
That was never more real for me than in a Canon U.S. House building hearing room with then Governor Mike Beebe as he testified to a Congressional Committee on FEMA’s failed response following devastating tornadoes in Arkansas. In the face of the Bush administration’s failure, he said plainly that the administration could “lead, follow or get out of the way, but we’re going to take care of Arkansas.”
Hillary Clinton summed up this Southern spirit in her first week as a candidate. She said, “We need to build the economy of tomorrow, not yesterday. We need to strengthen families and communities because that’s where it all starts.”
She noted that, “the deck is still stacked in favor of those already at the top. There’s something wrong with that. There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker. There’s something wrong when American workers keep getting more productive, as they have … but that productivity is not matched in their paychecks.”
Sometimes, as Southern Democrats, we need a little more of that forward-looking perspective. We’re here to help because we know the way forward.
Democrats have done it before and with Hillary Clinton we can do it again. We are the party that provided a safety net for sick people and old people. We’re the party that brought you the 40-hour work week and fights for equal pay for equal work. We’re the party that can drive our communities, our states, our region, and our country forward. Hillary Clinton sees the way forward. She has the vision, the resilience and the leadership that people — Southerners, Democrats and all Americans — are hungry for today. In fact, the efforts of the “Ready for Hillary” group signed up more than 400,000 supporters in the South.
We Southern Democrats know resilience and we have never stopped believing that we can once again move our region forward with a revival of renewed opportunity and optimism. And that revival is coming.
We can see the glimmer of our Camelot in the distance, approaching like the caravan carrying an old-fashioned tent revival. Candidates across the South and Hillary Clinton can lead this caravan with their pragmatic, hard-working values and focus on policies that give all Americans a fighting chance.
Isaac Wright is the Executive Director of Correct The Record, a strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from right-wing attacks.
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