Democrats: Can't go home again?

Posted by Mark Silva at 8:45 am CST and updated at 2:20 pm CST

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- The difference between Dave "Mudcat'' Saunders and most Democratic campaign consultants is that Mudcat knows the difference between the cherished "Bubba'' voter and the sorry redneck.

Here's a big new test of that knowledge: Can Jim Webb, decorated Vietnam veteran, author and secretary of the Navy under President Reagan who is now sharply critical of the war in Iraq, overcome an incumbent Republican senator, George Allen of Virginia, with the help of a couple of guys who know their way around the backwoods of a very Red state?

Saunders, an outdoorsman extraordinaire and NASCAR and Bluegrass aficionado from Southwest Virginia, and Steve Jarding, a seasoned political operative from South Dakota teaching at Harvard these days, are credited for the "rural strategy'' that helped Democrat Mark Warner win the governor's race in Virginia in 2001 with an aggressive cultural appeal to conservative Democrats who had left the party years ago.

Warner has moved on to a broader field, laying groundwork for a possible presidential campaign in 2008. He has left the Virginia governor's mansion in the hands of another Democrat, Tim Kaine, who benefited from another new phenomenon in this long-Republican state: The support of exurban voters in heavily congested corridors of Northern Virginia.

And Saunders and Jarding have taken on a new long bet: defeating one of Virginia's fairly well entrenched Republicans. Allen was governor of Virginia from 1994-98 before election to the Senate and served as chairman of the fund-raising National Republican Senatorial Committee - taking some
credit for election of four new Republicans to the Senate in 2004.

Webb has to clear a Democratic Party Senate primary first, and Allen's chief of staff has deployed a familiar tactic in saying the senator welcomes that primary contest "between two self-funding liberals.''

(Webb's Democratic opponent in the June primary also questions Webb's ability to shed his past affiliation with Republicans to the satisfaction of Democratic primary voters -- Webb had endorsed Republican Sen. Allen in his 2000 race over the Democratic candidate, Sen. Chuck Robb, for instance.

"I don't see how he survives the primary,'' says Mo Elleithee, a consultant for Webb rival Harris Miller who suddenly finds himself at odds with friends Mudcat Saunders and Steve Jarding, with whom Elleithee had worked on the Warner campaign -- as press secretary. "We would welcome him into the Democratic Party, but a lot of his past positions are positions he's going to seriously have to give answers to before Democratic voters are willing to make him their standard-bearer.'')

But Webb is no novice. The decorated Naval Academy graduate, Marine, novelist and former Navy secretary is waging a campaign founded on the Republican Party's presumed strong-suit: national defense.

"The foreign policy of this administration has been taken over by people who would do something we've never done in our history, and that is to attempt to export our ideology at the point of a gun," Webb said during a news conference announcing his candidacy earlier this month in Richmond.

Webb served as a rifle platoon and company commander in Vietnam, and was awarded the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts.

He became a lawyer and author of six war novels. His "Rules of Engagement'' became a film, which he also produced, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson in 2000. He had served as counsel to a House committee before becoming assistant secretary of defense under Reagan and then Navy secretary in 1987. He resigned his Navy post in 1988 under protest of congressional-mandated force reductions.

And, of course, the first thing his campaign stands ready to tell Virginians is that he traces his roots to Scotch-Irish pioneers who settled in the mountains of southwest Virginia in the 18th Century. (

"He's a good horse,'' Jarding says of Webb. "We'll see.''

Saunders hasn't been around Virginia quite as long as Webb's ancestors, though he cheerfully describes himself as "112 years old.'' But he knows his way around the state, and Jarding has gone to school on it.

Last night, Saunders and Jarding appeared at an Arlington, Va., bookstore for a spirited reading of their new book: Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland.

It's one-part history and homage to the populist heritage of the Democratic Party, the New Deal and the Great Society, one-part diatribe about the damage that the Republican Party has wrought, one-part lament about how a highly-decorated veteran Sen. John Kerry could lose the 2004 election to President Bush, and one-very-big prescription for all Democrats interested in regaining a lost foothold in the South, a region of 100 million and growing that an "elitist'' Democratic leadership has casually forfeited.

Kerry's dismissal of the Southern vote was shocking, they suggest, with Saunders ruefully recalling one of the most disastrous photo-ops of the Kerry campaign: "Riding a wind-surfer in Spandex.''

Jarding is the credentialed operative in this duo: Ran Tom Daschle's first campaign for the Senate from South Dakota in 1986, Bob Kerrey's two Senate wins in Nebraska in 1988 and 1994 and Warner's race in 2001.

Saunders is the self-proclaimed "hillbilly'' – as Jarding introduced himself and Saunders as a couple of "rural'' guys from Virginia and South Dakota last night, Saunders said: "I'm worse than rural, Steve, I'm hillbilly.''

These guys pull no punches.

"The differences between Bubba and the redneck are many,'' they write in a chapter called Getting to Know the Culture of Rural America.

"In the world of campaigning, the most important is that Bubba is registered to vote. On the other hand, rednecks can't or don't vote,'' Jarding and Saunders opine. "They can't vote for any number of reasons – domestic violence, auto theft, every kind of auto part theft, breaking and entering, entering and breaking, shooting deer at night, selling bear parts in the Far East, 200 bad checks all less than ten dollars each, meth sales, and of course, another several thousand or so alcohol-related crimes.''

After the very citified reading at Olsson's Book Store in downtown Arlington, a man asked Saunders where he got the name, Mudcat. "My mother gave it to me,'' Saunders replied without missing a beat. He mercifully reassured the astounded questioner: "Just kidding."

In a political world that already had discovered the "Soccer Moms,'' these two are credited with unearthing the "NASCAR Dads.'' They were told from the start of Warner's campaign that it was hopeless, that, as Jarding says, "Virginia was trending Red faster than any state in the nation.''

So they decided that Warner should sponsor a racing truck.

"We weren't smart,'' Jarding says. "We were desperate.''

With Saunders' connections – he had handled negotiations for many years for NASCAR's Wood Brothers Racing Team – the patched together a NASCAR truck and commissioned a Bluegrass band for a Warner song.

The debut of Warner's truck was a fear-filled day, with the rented engine producing a troublesome ticking. Worse yet, the truck would have to qualify for the race in time trials. With the candidate arriving for the big show, Saunders and Jarding prepared Plan B: a spectacular crash.

"There was a good chance we were going to qualify or hit the wall,'' says Saunders, recalling the instructions for the race-truck driver if he wasn't making qualifying time: Hit the wall, flip the truck – "Do anything you can. Make it spectacular. Get us on TV.

"We got in the race by one-one-thousandth of a second,'' Saunders says with an ironic smile. "If that hadn't happened, there wouldn't have been anyone today talking about NASCAR Dads. The NASCAR Dad came into existence by one-one-thousandth of a second.''
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Never mind that Warner was a Connecticut Yankee who had made a fortune in the cell-phone business. With a precinct-by-precinct analysis of regions of Virginia where people had stopped voting or were voting for the other party, Warner campaign waged a grassroots bid for rural votes. "The point was… Democrats have to learn how to count again,'' Jarding says.

Warner won 51.4 percent of the vote in rural Virginia, Jarding says, and with it the governor's mansion.

"People say you've got to have a Southern candidate to win in the South,'' Saunders says. "That couldn't be farther from the truth.''

The Democrats haven't only forfeited national security to the Republicans, Jarding complains. They have forfeited family values as well.

"Americans think the Republicans are the party of family values. Americans are wrong,'' says Jarding, whose passion for his politics reaches a fever-pitch when he reels out an argument that Jarding and Saunders also make in their fire-breathing book. "The fabric of family life in America is being torn apart today because 46 million people don't have health insurance… Twenty percent of American children go to bed hungry every night… You tell me that's not tearing the American family apart.

"Everything will be fine, so long as two gay guys don't get married in Massachusetts,'' says Jarding, in mockery of Republican tactics.

Jarding, counting only four Democratic U.S. senators among the 11 states of the old Confederacy, sees a daunting task ahead for his party as he and Saunders set out to help Webb navigate the rural Virginia culture.

Jarding and Saunders have performed the Electoral College math of future presidential elections, counted the growing population of the South and the persistent as-they-perceive-it cultural ignorance of their party's East Coast leaders. And Jarding says flatly: "If we don't figure out how to get into the South, as a Democratic Party, we're going to be in big trouble.''