"Much of the South’s current conservative passion stems from a personal and often racial dislike of President Obama ..."

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Southern Politicians Try to Hold Back the Tides
By David Firestone, June 3, 2014

It’s always taken longer to get to the future in the South, and the region’s social tardiness has been on display in this season’s political races. For the moment, at least, harsh and fossilized language is still required of both Republican and Democratic candidates.

In Mississippi, a Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel, has a strong chance of knocking out the Republican incumbent, Senator Thad Cochran, in today’s party primary. Mr. McDaniel has built his case on the dubious premise that Mr. Cochran has dared to work with Democrats in the past, and remains a captive of compromises and the discredited politics of the pork barrel.

“Mississippi is the most conservative state in the republic,” Mr. McDaniel said at rally on Saturday. “It deserves the most conservative senator in the republic.” (Even if he found enough voters who care about maintaining that standard, he would have considerable competition from other Tea Party colleagues for that particular race to the bottom.)

In Kentucky, Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat who is challenging Senator Mitch McConnell, blasted President Obama’s groundbreaking decision to reduce carbon emissions from power plants, nakedly pandering to the state’s economic interest in coal and the many voters whose livelihoods come from it. She said on Monday that she would “fiercely oppose the president’s attack on Kentucky’s coal industry because protecting our jobs will be my No. 1 priority.”

Still, it’s clear that these kinds of adamant pronouncements are planted in sand, and within a few years will be washed away by changing tides. Ms. Grimes and Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, another Democrat in a tight race, undoubtedly feel that the politics of the moment call for a firm embrace of fossil fuels. But as the country begins to see the evidence of climate change, and accept the overwhelming consensus of science, voters are starting to accept the wisdom — the necessity — of carbon controls.

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 70 percent of Americans want stronger federal limits on greenhouse gases, even if that raises household bills. Those numbers hold true even in red states, like Kentucky, where electricity is produced largely by coal. And in fact the state’s elected and appointed officials last year acknowledged a need to move away from coal, capture carbon from smokestack emissions, and begin using more natural gas. They asked the White House for flexibility in finding ways to reduce coal emissions, and got much of what they requested in the decision released on Monday.

That kind of realism is unavailable to Ms. Grimes, who’s fighting a dedicated pro-coal opponent and feels the need to put daylight between herself and the White House. Within a few years, though, as coal jobs decline and the state moves toward the mainstream, it will be possible for a Democrat running statewide to break from the kind of language Ms. Grimes is using.

Similarly, the time will come when even Mississippi voters throw off the need to prove themselves the most conservative in the nation. As Jonathan Martin of The Times wrote this morning, immigration and migration from other parts of the country are already liberalizing the political mix in Virginia and North Carolina, and similar changes can also be seen in some suburban areas of Georgia and South Carolina. Much of the South’s current conservative passion stems from a personal and often racial dislike of President Obama, but after he passes from the scene, the region will no longer be immune to the larger forces that the Tea Party was formed to resist.
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