November 15, 1971
Page 41342
MUSKIE'S SOUTHERN STRATEGY
HON. JACK EDWARDS OF ALABAMA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Monday, November 15, 1971
Mr. EDWARDS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, issues are certainly important in a campaign, yet one must avoid the opportunity to create or design issues for mere political gain. I call your attention to the following editorial from the Birmingham News in hopes that we follow the advice provided by a southern newspaper concerning the South and southern political strategy:
MUSKIE'S SOUTHERN STRATEGY
Sen. Edmund Muskie was at the University of Florida last week to make a speech which was, coincidentally, interrupted by a company of women's libbers.
If there were such a thing as "Southern lib," its members would be the ones who should have protested, for Muskie delivered still another in a seemingly endless series of denunciations of the so-called "Southern strategy" allegedly guiding the Nixon administration.
This "Southern strategy," Muskie said, is "an insult to the South" which must be rejected in 1972.
We understand Sen. Muskie's political motivation in making such charges. He (or almost any of the other national Democratic presidential aspirants) would be beaten badly by Mr. Nixon in most Southern states – although a "Southern strategist" headquartered in Montgomery could be a complicating factor if the '72 choice is three-way rather than two-way.
But the Maine senator should explain just what it is about the President's "Southern strategy" that is insulting to this region. For that "strategy" is purely and simply to treat the South as an equal part of the union.
This is not insulting to Southerners. What is insulting is the anti-South bias on the part of "liberals" who assume that every white Southerner is a racist who has only hidden his Kluxer sheet in the linen closet until another day, and that the South is a hopeless region that has to be governed by discriminatory policies and punitive legislation, formulated by pure hearts elsewhere who know what's best for us.
It is these people, Sen. Muskie included, who are following a "Southern strategy." Their strategy is to promote themselves in the rest of the country by trying to make it appear that anyone the South supports – especially if he is a Republican and his name is Richard Nixon – must be somehow un-American.