Cinema: Money, Money, Money

Jimmy Carter, a product of the progressive politics that infiltrated the South in the '60s, harbors a strong desire to rid his region of old-guard conservatives and Nixonian Republicans. High on his hit list in this election were three of the most conservative Republicans: John Tower of Texas, Strom Thurmond South Carolina and Jesse Helms of Carolina. All faced strong challengers who received personal help from Carter. And all three Republicans won.

But Democratic senatorial candidates in the South were able to lose even without Carter's help. Former Virginia Attorney General Andrew Miller never invited Carter in, though the President was willing. He lost by a slim margin to former Navy Secretary John Warner, thus casting Elizabeth Taylor in yet another role, Senate wife. In Mississippi, Cochran became the first Republican Senator in almost a century, partly because the black vote was split Democrat Maurice Dantin and independent Black Civil Rights Leader Charles Evers.

Democrats also lost two hotly contested gubernatorial races. Carter stumped for wheeler-dealer Banker Jake in Tennessee, but he was upset by Republican Lamar Alexander, who walked 1,000 miles across the state to conquer his reputation for aloofness. Texas activist Attorney General John Hill, who had toppled Governor Dolph Briscoe in Democratic primary, eschewed Carters help. But he too was upset, by Oilman William Clements.

Do these Democratic defeats mean a Southern repudiation of the first President from the Deep South since the Civil War? Not really. But they do emphasize the birth of the two-party system in the once Solid South.

The G.O.P. breakthroughs were mostly individual. As in the rest of the country, elections in the South did not generally turn on party lines or the President's popularity. Perhaps because local taxes tend to be lower in the South, there were also fewer manifestations of the tax-cut issue. In fact there were few issues at all: attention seemed to focus on such trivial things as, in Texas, a spurned handshake (Senator Tower's public rebuff to Democrat Robert Krueger) and, in Virginia, a famous wife.

While candidates across the South repeatedly denounced high government spending, they were less critical of campaign spending. The old Confederacy was awash with money, much of it from the candidates' own deep pockets. Thirty years ago, Clements founded an oil-drilling firm that made him one of Texas' richest men. He guaranteed loans of $4.2 million in his massive, $6.4 million campaign for Governor. Said he: "The spending was totally necessary because unlike a career politician, I had an identification problem." His elaborate phone banks reached 17,000 voters a day and seemed to bring out every Republican for the election. Consequently, tour guides at the Austin statehouse will no longer point to the portrait of Edmund Jackson Davis, who was elected in 1869, as the state's last Republican chief executive.

Similarly, Alabama Democrat Forrest ("Fob") James, who parlayed a sporting goods empire into a personal fortune, used $2 million in his successful primary bid and then coasted to victory in the race to succeed George Wallace.