Democrat Not Spoken Here

Carlton Sparks is the reason the GOP has a stranglehold on the South. With his wife, Cindi, and their 17-year-old son, Andrew, he lives in an unassuming, tan, one-story home off a country road surrounded by mountains. Sparks, 49, makes a good living for a resident of Blairsville, Georgia. He pulls in more than $45,000 a year from Blue Ridge Mountain Electric Membership Corporation, where he works as a warehouseman.

Sparks grew up a self-described Kennedy Democrat, born to a single mom in 1954, a time, he notes, when single mothers weren't too popular. After high school, he joined the military for a short stint, got out and went to work at his uncle's sawmill, before joining a Blue Ridge EMC right-of-way crew. This was before they used chainsaws. "They's people in prison don't work as hard as what we worked," he recalls, "but I had to have it." He had a wife and baby girl to support.

Watching him light up Winstons or ramble up the drive to his home in his heavy-duty pick-up, you might pigeonhole Sparks with a glance -- typical NASCAR dad. You'd be wrong. He defies easy categorization. True, one minute he's doling out the Fox News/talk radio clichés about "big government" and school prayer, but in his next breath, he's telling the stories of his neighbors and coworkers, talking vividly about the death grip squeezing rural middle class America, the battle he watches, in person, every day. It has nothing to do with affirmative action or the pledge of allegiance.

In Sparks lies the great conundrum of modern Southern politics: The average white male, for whom the system has always worked, is having an increasingly difficult time making ends meet -- as if consumer debt recently topping $2 trillion for the first time wasn't enough of a clue. His wages have dropped when adjusted for inflation. His health insurance premiums have skyrocketed (if he has health insurance). He and his wife both have to work, and they pay astronomical childcare bills. His younger kids' schools are crappy and under-funded. His older kids' college tuition jumped (14 percent in the last year, on average). And heaven help his children if they don't go to college, because they're bound for a near-feudal system of working for wealthy people in low-paying service sector jobs. Moreover, if the average Joe is like Sparks, 30 percent of what he stashed away for retirement evaporated in a stock market fiasco fueled by corporate greed that a bit more government oversight could have prevented.

So where's the anger? Why isn't he pissed that he's not getting more bang for his taxpayer buck? And why in the world is he going to vote for a president based on a side issue like gay marriage?

I spent a week on the road trying to figure out why traditionally Democratic rural whites have so solidly embraced a Republican Party whose economic program runs directly counter to their own interests.

I started in the mountain hamlet of Young Harris, Georgia -- the hometown of U.S. Sen. Zell Miller -- and in nearby Blairsville. Then, on to Seneca, S.C., the birthplace of Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards. Finally, I headed to Polk County, one of the poorest parts of central Florida. Like much of the rural South, each town I visited was relatively poor, overwhelmingly white and voted for President Bush in 2000. At each stop, I looked for working poor and middle-income people, asked them how they voted and why. The answers were depressingly facile, filled with the perfectly parroted lingo of the right-wing echo chamber, and yet, once I dug, often so thin, disconnected and confused that I wondered whether a strong wind (or populist candidate with the right message) might reorder the political landscape.

"Part of the problem that any political party would have ... is: Do you take the political world as you find it or do you try to change the electorate?" says Emory University political scientist Merle Black. The answer for progressives and populists is the latter if they intend to solve the riddle of their dwindling support, because these are the places where politicians fear to tread, places populated by the most ignored voters in the country. These are the people for whom governments, Democratic and Republican, have done little in the last 30 years.