The idea goes back 11 years, to an obscure candidate for Governor of Kentucky named Wallace Wilkinson and his then obscure political consultant, James Carville. Wilkinson was going nowhere, badly trailing his better-known opponents in the Democratic primary. Then, in a debate in Louisville, he proposed instituting a lottery and using the money for education. The next day his wife returned from a day of campaigning and reported that everywhere she went, people told her they loved the idea. Wilkinson went on to win, closing his campaign with a commercial that showed a crowd chanting, "Taxes, no! Lottery, yes!" Carville went on to Georgia, where in 1990 he made a lottery the centerpiece of another campaign for Governor, this one by Zell Miller.
Eight years later, James Carville is James Carville, Zell Miller is retiring as Georgia Governor with an 80% approval rating, and the lottery is being hailed as the secret to the Democratic Party's astonishing rebirth in the South. Last week in Alabama and South Carolina, two states that had been trending hard toward the G.O.P., Democrats ousted sitting Republican Governors by single-mindedly pledging to follow Georgia into the scratch-and-win business. Political consultants predict the issue will dominate next year's legislative session in Tennessee and the Governor's race in North Carolina in the year 2000.
Politically, the lottery solves a problem that has vexed Southern Democrats for years. The public schools in states like Alabama and South Carolina are badly underfunded and consistently score near the bottom in national rankings. But tax hating is one of the South's cherished pastimes. Carville's epiphany was that if Democrats could portray the lottery as a tax-free way to improve education, government spending could once again become a winning issue. And the Republicans, hostage to the Christian right's antigambling fervor, would be painted into a corner.
Skeptics charged that lottery proceeds would disappear into the morass of general government revenue. But once elected, Miller carefully earmarked the money for specific education programs, most notably the HOPE Scholarship, which pays state-college tuition for any Georgia high school graduate who maintains a B average. The scholarship, which has sent more than 330,000 students to college, has in a few short years attained sacred-cow status in the Peach State. The Democratic and Republican candidates to succeed Miller, each of whom once opposed a lottery, practically fell over one another to pledge HOPE's continuation. In Alabama and South Carolina, Democrats Don Siegelman and Jim Hodges both promised scholarship programs virtually identical to Georgia's.
On its face, the lottery-for-scholarship idea seems like a model of Third Way, New Democrat innovation. The HOPE money is awarded based on merit, so, unlike welfare or affirmative action, its recipients can't be stigmatized as undeserving. And it doesn't raise anyone's taxes. Dixie's Democrats have finally found a winning strategy consistent with their best principles.