The current spin about the South is prompting even Kerry, who is routinely stereotyped as a Massachusetts liberal in the Dukakis mold, to forge a “Southern strategy” of sorts. At a Jefferson-Jackson Day event in Atlanta, the decorated Vietnam veteran made a point of invoking the duty of the citizen soldier. Last Saturday, Kerry spoke to a group of Texas Democrats, under the auspices of the centrist Texas branch of the Democratic Leadership Council, on the subject of how the party could win in the Lone Star State. He mentioned the contributions of the DLC — welfare reform, targeted tax cuts, 100,000 more police officers on the streets — and highlighted his role as a veteran and a Democrat. “We did make a difference — in the war in Vietnam and the fights at home,” said Kerry, who also paid homage to two former World War II pilots from Texas, former president George H.W. Bush and former senator Lloyd Bentsen. Kerry’s speech could be seminal in turning him into the anti-Duke.

To win most of the South, you’ve got to move to the center. To win one very special state in the South — Florida — you’ve got to do what Republicans did in the North for the generation after the Civil War: wave the bloody shirt. Today this doesn’t mean reminding people of the sacrifices made in the war to end slavery. Now it refers to the way the Republicans pilfered the election in Florida last fall, about which emotions are still raw in the Sunshine State. A Miami Herald poll found Bush up by only six points last month, while former attorney general Janet Reno, a gubernatorial aspirant, is polling well against the president’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush. The Democratic masses are ready to be energized.

In May, former vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman thanked Democrats in Broward County for their efforts during the campaign. And just last weekend, Lieberman returned to the scene of the crime to rail against the Bushes. “Some people say that your governor deserves to lose just because of what he did to Al Gore and me last fall,” he said, speaking at the Miami Beach Hilton. “But to tell you the truth, he deserves to lose because of what he’s done to the people of Florida for the past four years.” But Lieberman didn’t stop with rhetoric; even as he stressed the trauma of the Florida election, he reached out to conservative Cuban voters who turned away from Gore last time, meeting with the Cuban American National Foundation during the same visit.

Meanwhile, Edwards invoked Florida at a meeting of African-American Baptist leaders in North Carolina. Speaking to the group, Edwards said he was “outraged by what happened in Florida, particularly to African-American voters.” He added: “It was wrong. It was undemocratic, and we’ve got to see that it never, ever happens again.”

Let’s face it. Polls showed Democrats winning on the issues last fall; the trouble was simply that Gore never sealed the deal personally. So identifying winning issues for the Democrats shouldn’t be difficult. Edwards has staked his ground with Republican senator John McCain, pushing the so-called patients’ bill of rights. He’s fighting most vigorously for that part of the bill allowing patients to sue HMOs — a cause that should both win him points with the public and set him up to raise big money from trial attorneys. The high-profile issue poll-vaulted Edwards into a position to give the Democratic radio response to a Bush address earlier in June: “Here’s the bottom line — President Bush has a decision to make.... He has to decide whether he’s on the side of patients and their doctors, or if he’s on the side of big insurance companies and HMOs.” Not bad for someone elected to the Senate just three years ago.

It should come as no surprise that Kerry is focusing on the environment, as he’s been working on the issue for two decades. In June, the day after Bush issued a statement on global warming (Global warming? What global warming?), Kerry gathered a group of scientists at the Center for Global Health and Environment at Harvard Medical School to respond to the president. He criticized Bush for “repeatedly question[ing] the underlying science of climate change” and for reversing a campaign pledge to lower the level of power-plant pollutants. Kerry, a sponsor of the Energy Efficient Buildings Incentives Act, also urged Bush to “stop, to take time to understand the issue ... and to change course.”

Meanwhile, Lieberman, now free of his pairing with Gore, has retaken the center with a values-driven campaign centered on the entertainment industry. The chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, Lieberman wants the Federal Trade Commission to regulate the current entertainment ratings system.

The flip side of finding a popular issue is finding an issue you can use to show the president up. The master of this technique so far is Governor Gray Davis in California. By now everyone knows that the Golden State’s chief executive has taken a beating during the West Coast energy crisis. Rather than simply allow himself to be buffeted by the issue, however, Davis has managed to turn it into an advantage. When Bush traveled to California on May 29 to respond — many thought belatedly — to the power crisis, Davis dramatically exited his 35-minute powwow with the president to announce his intent to sue the federal government for failing to regulate the spiraling price of electricity. Later, Davis sat stone-faced as Bush stated his opposition to price caps at a World Affairs Council luncheon. Bush and Davis stared each other down like a pair of gunslingers. Also in May, Davis attacked Bush on ABC’s This Week. “While everyone believes in the profit motive and while I’ve been strongly pro-business, you don’t charge $1900 a megawatt-hour for something that last year you charged $30 for,” Davis said. “That is obscene. No one can defend it. The company is named Reliant. It’s in Texas. It’s a big buddy of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney.” Davis’s hiring of Gore-campaign pit bulls Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane at $30,000 a month confirmed both the governor’s higher ambition and his willingness to rough Bush up.

Biden is taking swipes at Bush as well. The new Democratic head of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Biden is using his perch to go after Bush’s lack of international acumen. The senator didn’t miss a beat when, during a recent trip overseas, Bush called Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar “Anzar” and declared, “Africa is a nation.” During Bush’s trip, according to Joan Vennochi of the Boston Globe, Biden quipped at a Boston fundraiser: “I don’t want him making a mistake ... we have a problem internationally not when they doubt our power. It’s when they doubt our wisdom.”