Washington -- It is 7 a.m. and half the contingent of black Republicans in Congress is ready for breakfast in a Capitol Hill hotel swarming with freshmen legislators. He is Oklahoma's J.C. Watts (the other half is Connecticut's Gary Franks), who expects that after a few more elections the contingent of black conservatives will be bigger.
"It is," he says dryly, "pretty radical to say you don't know black families that want to bring home more of their paychecks or go to schools where kids carry books rather than guns." His father's schooling ended in the seventh grade, but he knows that when he buys cattle for $7,500 and sells them for $12,000 he has a stake in a capital-gains tax cut.
Julius Caesar Watts Jr. is not the most exotically named Oklahoma athlete. There was Cal McLish -- Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish -- Anadarko, Oklahoma's gift to baseball. But Mr. Watts played an almost sacerdotal role in Oklahoma: He was the Sooners' quarterback. Running the wishbone offense was good preparation for politics: Quarterbacks carried the ball, and took additional punishment as blockers. He was drafted by the New York Jets, but they wanted him for services other than quarterbacking, so he played six years in Canada before coming home to business and a youth ministry.
As an undergraduate journalism major in 1980 he covered a debate between two U.S. Senate candidates and came away convinced that the Republican was better. That Republican, Don Nickles, is now the fourth-ranking Republican leader, chairman of the Policy Committee.
But when Mr. Watts was growing up, "In my house there were two things you didn't talk about -- sex and Republicans." In 1956 Eisenhower won a majority of black votes. In 1960 Mr. Watts' father voted for Nixon (he considered Kennedy too inexperienced). However, the threads connecting blacks to the GOP were snapped in 1964 by the nomination of Barry Goldwater, who voted against that year's civil-rights bill.
Mr. Watts, who voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and for Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter before that, has never voted for a presidential winner. But in 1989 he "aligned my registration with my convictions" and in 1990 won a seat as a Republican on Oklahoma's regulatory commission. This year, when Democratic Rep. Dave McCurdy sought a Senate seat, Mr. Watts ran for daylight. His success is, paradoxically, part of the process that began with the Goldwater candidacy.
The conservative ascent began with the shattering of the Democrat's "solid South." Goldwater carried five Deep South states, winning 87 percent of Mississippi votes. Today the second- and third-ranking Republican leaders in the Senate (Minority Leader Trent Lott and Conference Chairman Thad Cochran) are Mississippians, as is the chairman of the Republican Party, Haley Barbour. Roger Wicker, who just won the Mississippi congressional seat held by Democrats since Reconstruction and by Jamie Whitten since 1941, has been elected temporary chairman of the 73-member Republican freshman class.
From the Civil War until recently, the two parties were not both competitive in all regions because Republicans were weak in the South. Now Democrats are extraordinarily weak there, and in the Mountain West. These regions compose the "Republican L" which extends South from the Canadian border through Nebraska and Kansas to Oklahoma and Texas, then east across the South.
The ascendancy of Southerners within the GOP (Senators Lott, Cochran, Nickles, Georgia's Speaker Gingrich, Texas' Dick Armey as House majority leader and Tom DeLay as majority whip and Bill Archer as chairman of Ways and Means and Sen. Phil Gramm as presidential candidate and Louisiana's Bob nTC Livingston as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee) astonishing in ways that J.C. Watts, just 37, perhaps can hardly comprehend.
He was born in 1957, when the nation was preoccupied with an Arkansas governor -- Orval Faubus and integration of Little Rock's Central High School by paratroopers. Southern Republicans were virtually non-existent. That South is as gone as the Soviet Union.
Still, this year Mr. Watts' opponent ran an ad featuring a high school photo of Mr. Watts with a huge Afro haircut. There was not a peep from national Democrats or the national media. If a white Republican had done that with a black Democrat there would have been a continent-wide indignation festival. "You know," says Mr. Watts with the relaxed chuckle of a black Republican fresh from carrying a district just 7 percent black and 69 percent Democratic, "I worked pretty hard on my Afro and he made fun of it."
He favors term limits and says he wants to wind up farming in Eufaula, Oklahoma. But before he does he expects there will be a time when, if he and other black conservatives in Congress gather for breakfast, they will need a bigger table.
9- George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.
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