God's Own Party:
A
Democrat in Sheep's Clothing
by
Charles Reagan Wilson
The 2007
Mississippi gubernatorial race was a campaign that would have been hard to
imagine only a few years ago—a Bible-thumping Democratic candidate versus a
Republican incumbent who tried to separate religion from politics.
But back in April, the Washington Post’s Dan Gilgoff
anticipated that the race would have national significance as “the next step
in the Democratic Party’s plan for making inroads among evangelicals and
other serious churchgoers.” In no place has that been more important to
Democratic hopes than in the South, the once solid Democratic region that
became overwhelmingly Republican in the 1990s. George W. Bush won every
southern state in both 2000 and 2004. In the latter year, churchgoing
Southern evangelicals marched as never before as the foot soldiers of the
GOP, going to the polls in unprecedented numbers and replacing five retiring
southern Democratic senators with Republicans. Before 2007, however, it had
been many years since religion figured prominently in an important
Mississippi election.
Haley Barbour, the incumbent governor, was a nationally
prominent political operative who served as chairman of the Republican
National Committee in the early 1990s, when Republican strategists worked to
establish the GOP as God’s Only Party. Barbour then became a powerful
Washington lobbyist, representing tobacco, oil, and insurance companies
among others.
In his first term, he dominated state politics, introducing
an unprecedented level of party discipline into the Mississippi legislature
and putting together a winning coalition of conservative Democrats and
Republicans in the state House of Representatives to go along with a
Republican-controlled state Senate. He cut the state’s debt, opposed new
taxes (including a popular proposal to increase Mississippi’s cigarette tax
while reducing its high sales tax), and successfully recruited new
businesses, including a Toyota factory in northeast Mississippi. He also won
kudos for his leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which
devastated the Mississippi coast.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was
funneling tens of millions of dollars to southern states in hopes of
building a competitive political infrastructure. In 2006, DNC Chairman
Howard Dean hired four new staff members to work with the Mississippi
Democratic Party, preparing for the 2007 gubernatorial race. The Democratic
nominee, John Arthur Eaves Jr., devised a strategy that made his pronounced
personal religiosity the foundation of his campaign.
“His momma read him Bible stories at bed time and rocked him
to sleep singing the old hymn ‘In the Garden,’” read the text on Eaves’
campaign website. It also told that “he gave his life to Christ at age 8”
and years later took three of his sons to Israel and watched as they were
baptized in the Jordan River. “He is pro-life, pro-prayer, pro-Bible
literacy and pro-guns,” the website said. Not leaving anything in doubt, it
added that Eaves was “a Southern Baptist running for office.”
Such open religiosity is not, of course, that startling in
the Bible Belt, but recent Democratic candidates even there have rarely been
as aggressive as Republicans at putting their faith to work on the stump.
Eaves constantly repeated a question at rallies and in advertisements:
“Who’s on Jesus’ side in Mississippi?” His television ads pictured him
leaning on a farm fence holding a Bible, a powerful image in one of the
nation’s most rural states and one in which evangelicals, by some estimates,
represent half of the electorate.
Eaves’ campaign literature was full of biblical imagery. In
one TV ad, he portrayed the race as David versus Goliath. Another had him
holding a Bible and saying, “Jesus ministered to the least and the lost, and
he threw the moneychangers out of the temple.” He later directly linked
Barbour, the wealthy lobbyist for big business, to the “moneychangers” that
Jesus attacked in the Temple.
Eaves coupled this overt appeal to Christian voters with an
overall populist program that emphasized improved health care, education,
and job creation. Jesus, Eaves said, healed the sick, taught the truth, and
helped the poor. He claimed the Good Samaritan ideal and evoked a popular
Southern Baptist leadership model, that of servant leadership, when he said
the “greatest form of service is to serve your neighbor.”
By creating a platform overtly based on Christ’s ministry,
Eaves clearly targeted white working class voters who had deserted the
Democratic Party in the red states as the GOP effectively used the Religious
Right’s moral agenda to deflect Democratic appeals to their economic
interests.
For his part, Barbour pitched his campaign on his successes
at economic development and his image as a strong leader after Hurricane
Katrina. In televised debates, he was visibly annoyed at Eaves’ religious
references.
In one debate, Eaves, referring to the fact that Barbour had placed profits
from his lobbying business in a blind trust but had not authorized release
of its details, declared (in the words of Matthew and Luke), “Where your
treasure is, there your heart will be, also.”
“My opponent loves to quote the Bible,” Barbour irritably
responded. “I’ll spare you the sanctimony.”
Barbour went on to say that the election should not be about
one’s personal faith, straying from the conventional GOP strategy in the
South by suggesting that religion did not have a role in politics. Albeit a
deacon in his Yazoo City Presbyterian church, he does not come out of the
Falwell-Robertson wing of the Republican Party.
For all his years in Washington, Barbour is rooted in the
South’s small town, male-oriented folk culture—a world of hunting, fishing,
storytelling, and drinking. After he instituted budget-slashing measures in
his first years in office, the story in the state was that everything in
state government had been cut except the governor’s budget for Maker’s Mark.
Both candidates were in fact thoroughly Mississippi
establishment. Both went to Ole Miss, and where one is a wealthy former
lobbyist, the other is a wealthy trial lawyer. Eaves’ father ran twice
unsuccessfully for governor (making use of his faith in his campaigns
decades ago).
As the race came to a head last fall, the state and national
press played closer attention to Eaves’ “walk of faith,” as he referred to
his campaign. AP reporter Emily Wagster Pettus noted in an October 29 story
that in Mississippi “the ballot box and the old rugged cross are
intertwined.”
In another October article, veteran Jackson
Clarion-Ledger columnist Sid Salter wrote that many of Mississippi’s
liberal Democrats were “blasting Eaves for pandering because of his
religious stances.” Characterizing Eaves’ campaign as an expression of “the
Book of John Arthur Eaves, Jr.,” Salter called it “a paper-thin book”
because there were no realistic public policy proposals to go with the
religious rhetoric.
Just prior to the election, the Northeast Mississippi
Daily Journal suggested that many Mississippians saw Eaves’ Bible-waving
not as “an honest profession of belief but as a calculated attempt to
exploit religious faith for political gain.” Pointing to the Republican
Party’s frequent use of moralistic politics, the paper suggested that
candidates of faith in both parties “must resist the temptation to play the
‘God card’ as a political strategy.”
As a popular incumbent, Barbour had been expected to win in
a landslide with well over 60 percent of the vote. Two days before
Mississippians went to the polls, State Senator Hillman Frazier, an African
American from Jackson, told the Clarion Ledger that Eaves’ strategy
had forced Barbour to focus more on his own race, instead of campaigning for
Republican candidates in legislative races. “He’s been that pesky mosquito
that won’t go away,” Frazier said.
In the end, Barbour did win easily, but with 58 percent of
the vote fell below expectations. And in a result that threatened his
ability to have his way with the legislature during his second term, the
Democrats regained control of the state Senate.
In fact, Eaves was not much of a campaigner, and critics
took him to task for having a less than impressive grasp of many of the
policy issues facing the state. He also failed to win the support of of
Mississippi’s African- American leaders, many of whom gave their
endorsements to Barbour.
But Eaves’ ability to unsettle a powerful GOP incumbent by
combining staunch support for evangelical social issues with economic
populism seemed a sign of things to come—and not only Democrats seeking to
play the faith card. Indeed, hardly were the Mississippi returns in than the
usually smooth Republican presidential primary waters were being roiled by a
former Republican governor from the other side of the Mississippi using the
same potent combination. |