yes toadfrog, you are missing something. I could also have used an analogous phrase like "post-Dixiecrat Southern Democrats".

The ideological underpinnings of the Dixiecrat movement of the mid-20th century in the South still exist in today's politicians in both parties.

The Jackson-led Rainbow Coalition wing of the Democratic Party of the 1980s, like the Wellstone/Feingold progressive populist wing of the Democratic Party of the 1990s, rarely have been Clinton supporters, so your memory is racially pretty selective, it seems. Clinton is in Harlem because he got cheap office space that made him look good after the uproar for choosing the very pricey space in the Carnegie Tower, and it had a whole lot to do with the courting of the black NYC vote for his wife's next senate campaign. The 1994 mid-term election was a disaster for Clinton and the "New Democrats" and there was much handwringing over whether the New Democrats could ever lure the Reagan Democrats back into the fold.

Here is an excerpt from an article by Jesse Jackson JR. (not his dad)from The Nation and reprinted at the Common Dreams website), on the eve of the Bush inauguration in January 2001. It is titled "George Bush's Democrats" explaining what I mean by Southern Democrat Dixiecrats:

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0105-05.htm

Following Vice President Al Gore's concession, President-elect Bush announced: "I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation. The President of the United States is the President of every single American, of every race and every background." It was an appropriate speech delivered from the Democratic-controlled Texas House chambers. Referring to the Texas House as "a home to bipartisan cooperation," Bush added, "Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent."
But who are George Bush's bipartisan Democrats?

Texas State Representative Paul Sadler, a Democrat, told the New York Times that Bush "didn't invent bipartisanship in Texas." It "kind of developed over the years because of the nature of the system." Nature of the system? What system? Essentially it is the same "system" around which the rest of the Southern Democratic Party developed.

The Southern Democratic Party was the party of slavery. Conservative Democrats were the Confederates during the Civil War. Democrats either were, or cooperated with, the KKK in resisting Reconstruction. Following Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), conservative Democrats practiced Jim Crow--separate and unequal. And after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), conservative Southern Democrats were the prime resisters of desegregation.

After Brown and the civil rights evolution of the 1960s, and the application of Goldwater's 1964 and Nixon's 1968 "Southern strategy," Southern white males especially began to leave the national Democratic Party in significant numbers. Republicans began to appeal to them with a series of racial themes and code words: "conservatism" during the civil rights struggles in 1964, "law and order" after the riots of 1967-68, "antibusing" in 1972, "welfare queen" in 1980, "Willie Horton" in 1988 and "compassionate conservatism" in 2000. Democrats also played this game: Carter's "ethnic purity" misstep in 1976 almost got him into serious trouble with the party's base; Bill Clinton used "Sister Souljah," and Al Gore emphasized crime ("blanket America in blue")--Democratic Southerners all. And all, Republicans and Democrats alike, are from the same system. Clinton redefined the Democratic Party away from the "special interests" of blacks--symbolized by Jesse L. Jackson Sr.--by politically manipulating a rapper. Because of Jackson's tireless pursuit of racial justice, and because he's a strong and highly visible Democrat, Republicans are now attempting to define and identify him as the symbol of the Democratic Party.

Taking a page from ultraconservative Ronald Reagan--who often referred favorably to the liberal FDR--Bush quoted the ideological founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson, a Virginian, was also the author of a Kentucky resolution and conservative theory of Southern resistance called "nullification," and his Democratic partner, James Madison, developed the theory of "interposition." Both concepts were forms of Southern resistance--first, resistance to ending slavery, and later to ending Jim Crow segregation. Jefferson also provided the ideological foundation for the concept of "local control"--the stepchild of "states' rights." Bull Connor, Jim Clark, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and George Wallace were all the products of this "system" and were Democratic advocates of states' rights, local control and an antifederal ideology of less government, lower taxes and a strong military.

It is this legacy of conservative Southern Democrats that created the "bipartisan system" that State Representative Paul Sadler referred to. It is this legacy of conservative Southern Democrats in Congress with which President-elect Bush intends to work. But the President-elect's problem of governing all of the people cannot be satisfied merely by building bridges to essentially conservative Southern Blue Dog, Yellow Dog, New Dog or DLC Dog Democrats. These conservative dogs already support him. His problem will be in reaching out and building bridges to liberals and progressives who feel like they've been treated like dogs, who represent the dogs who have been left out in the cold and put in the doghouse by a bipartisan coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats. Indeed, this is the bipartisan pack that consistently bites us.