Fasten Your Seatbelts

Prince Albert meets The Outsider. A Southern-style barn-burner, or at least that's what Gary Trudeau would have us believe.

The prize in this mythic Southern battle--a whopping 2000 plus delegates and a chance to lock up the Democratic and Republican nominations. And beyond that a chance for the South to rise again. Said to say, none of this will happen.

When 20 states--including 14 Southern and border states--go to the polls Tuesday, thousands of Americans will take a part in an experiment in regional power politics. From Washington state to Birmingham, Alabama and Key West, Florida, candidates must disseminate their messages, carefully targeted to appeal to this predominantly Southern audience. But the experiment has gone awry.

No candidate can campaign effectively in all 20 states, and, no presidential hopeful can personally offer a political vision that appeals to voters in the Northwest and the Southeast, from Missouri to Miami. Only through television advertising and shrewd political marketing can the candidates hope to "win" Super Tuesday, the headlined event of this primary season.

Super Tuesday's claim to Southern supremacy rested on the assumption that there would be a Southern candidate to lead the charge. But Sarr Nunn balked at the opportunity, and so did former Virginia Governor Charles Robb. That left Albert Gore '69, Harvard overseer, prep-school graduate to carry the mantle. But the Eastern-educated senator has had his troubles convincing voters that he's a good ole' boy who was brought up on a pig farm in Tennessee.

Gore, like much of the Southern political establishment, has banked his political future on Super Tuesday. He essentially withdrew from the races in New Hampshire and Iowa, concentrating his resources and stump time on the South. But Gore's strategy, like that of his region's, will likely be unsuccessful. In the weeks since New Hampshire, other candidates, too, have focused their attention on the South to the exclusion of the other eight states that hold primaries on Super Tuesday. And those efforts should be most beneficial to a liberal from Massachusetts, and a black activist based in Chicago.

But in the end, the biggest winner of all may prove to be what are known as wholesale politics. The biggest loser--the personal politics that held sway in Iowa and New Hampshire, where candidates often criscrossed the same small towns. Super Tuesday, as Robin Toner of the New York Times notes, is as much "the K-2 campaign" as the people's forum. K-2 is the satellite that makes it possible for Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D.Mo.) to answer questions from North Carolina and Wyoming from a hotel suite in Kansas City.

The Gore political message is an important one in understanding the symbolism of Super Tuesday. Gore's stump speech and his television advertisements proclaim his Southern heritage, his hawkish stance on national defense and his willingness to talk tough in a field of Democratic candidates that won't.

These issues, carefully designed to appeal to the conservative white voter in the South, are planned obfuscations of Gore's liberal past. His Congressional voting record is not significantly more conservative than the other presidential candidates; in fact, Gore's rating from the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action places him at the left end of the Democratic spectrum.

Political revisionism is hardly a phenomenon unique to the Gore campaign--Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) is an experienced practitioner of the art of the flip-flop, changing his stance on such key issues as supply-side economics and abortion. But Gore is a specifically Southern revisionist--his campaign message is tailored, like the Super Tuesday system itself, to attract a certain type of Southern voter. But the suit has proved ill-fitting.

A recent New York Times survey points to some of the flaws in tailor-making a platform to the regional voter's profile. The poll found that Democratic voters who support Gore were not substantially more "hawkish" on security issues, that Gephardt supporters were not more likely to blame Japan for the U.S.'s trade woes and that Dukakis backers were not most worried about a war in Central America.

Bush supporters were not much more pro-Reagan than Bob Dole's, and Dole's weren't more enticed by compromise with the Democrats than Bush's.

Those issues, of course, are what the candidates have converted into their personal crusades, yet they don't seem to be convincing the voters. As E.J. Dionne wrote, the poll "produced other fascinating anomalies that suggest how little the candidate's views have penetrated with voters in the vast region that will vote next Tuesday."

If Dionne's analysis is correct, then the marketing of Super Tuesday as the great Southern primary is overstated. The great television primary will prove to be a better tag.