As far as [the liberal northeastern elitists in the media are] concerned, the South is more American than the Northeast or the West . . . .

I agree with most of this post, but who thinks the South is more American than the West? No one is more American than a cowboy.

I agree with everything you've said, Paul.

One of the neat things about Edwards is that he allows us to concede regional style to the South -- the one region of the country that cares about it most -- while making absolutely no policy sacrifices whatsoever. A 100% NARAL rating wrapped up in a thick Southern accent is exactly what I'm looking for.

Yes, yes and yes! I am sick to death of souther self-congratulatory assumption of moral and patriotic superiority over the rest of America, the elitists who pay for southern schools and social programs, who vote for southern politicians and who tolerate southern chauvinism and belligerence. When have so many paid homage to so few for so little?

And when you add the self-pitying whine of the oppressed southern white male, it all makes me want to scream

There was a time when the South was demonized; the Bloody Shirt kept Southerners out of the White House for a century (unless you count Wilson). Nowadays, however, this peculiar region is no longer as set apart in the national imagination as such outlying places as Massachusetts, New York, Hollywood and San Francisco. It remains to be seen whether this condition will persist. I certainly hope not.

"the bloody shirt kept southerners out of the white house for a century?" Trying losing a war-for-slavery and traitorously attempting to destroy the entire country and see how welcome you are at the dinner table afterwards. Frankly, I think they are lucky we ever let them vote again which, as I recall, we did pretty much right after we won.

I'm very pro edwards for a lot of reasons but I'm sick to death of southern triumphalism, faux authenticity, faux gentility crossed with faux populism and an utterly corrupted and corrupting religiosity. Give me the clean air and attidudes of mass. new york, hollywood and san francisco where people live and let live.

aimai

As so often in the past, I'm with aimai. As a Massachusetts-born Northeasterner from a distinctly non-elite background, I've lost my ability to view the endless vilification of the part of the country I come from and--dare I say--love as a joke. I think there was once a tendency among Northeasterners to stereotype the south, and I concede that I personally will always find Tom Lehrer's line (circa 1965) "hold on when Alabama gets the bomb" incredibly funny, but this tendency has long been surpassed by the stereotyped views of Northeasterners &, I take, West-Coasters, as inauthentic, snobbish not-quite Americans. And it's worth remembering that these stereotypes have been fostered relentlessly by the unholy alliance of big money, crackpot religiosity and militarism that is ruining our country. I wonder how much of this attitude is continuous with old-fashioned nativism, i.e., not just anti-black prejudice and resentment of recent immigrants, but very old fashioned hostility to southern Europeans, to Jews and Catholics, to the Irish. Anyone who has grown up in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania will find the idea that these places lack 'ordinary' 'authentic' Americans bizarre, unless, of course, being Protestant and of English or Scotch-irish descent are necessary conditions to qualify.

I don't know. I'm not really under the impression that this idea about elite northeasterners comes from the Southern grassroots, however you want to characterize what you take to be its deviancy. I'd be better convinced that it came from Republican think tanks.

Of course, if you want to keep on chracterizing its deviancy here on Tapped, I'm sure some eager beaver will take notes and head south.

"unless, of course, being Protestant and of English or Scotch-irish descent are necessary conditions to qualify."

Don't forget white!

Having lived all over the country, including the South in my youth and later years, it has always struck odd that Southerners consider themselves more American and patriotic than others. They see no irony in simultaneously sporting Confederate battle flag motifs, symbols of treason and the fight to preserve the enslavement of a large part of the population.

Well, as an honest-to-God East Texas born and bred Southerner, I can tell you that at least part of why we're so touchy about all this is that you Yankees mostly portray us as dumb. Country music is considered more "authentic" only because rubes listen to it. (And don't kid yourselves that anything played on "country" radio after Garth Brooks is remotely related to the actual music of my region. It's as corporate as the next summer blockbuster.) No one really believes NASCAR requires any skill, it's just something we dimwits do. The only thing we ever get credit for inventing that has any actual merit is food, and even that's bad for you. When Yankees kindly quit treating a drawl as a symptom of Down's Syndrome, we'll immediately stop clinging to "authenticity."

I don't think it's so much that the Southern accent signifies some mystical "authenticity" as much as it just indicates "rural." And there are more rural electoral votes than urban. North Carolinians aren't anymore biased towards Northeasterners than folks in Wyoming, or Iowa, or North Dakota.

John Edwards,as well as Elizabeth are genuinely caring of America.That's what mostly important to me.

I will be supporting a candidate that morally cares about not only the US but the world. Southern accent or not,does not matter to me!

@Karen: Just grow up. Try living in California, Mass, or NY, and hearing the endless smears delivered in Southern accents. Everyone comes in for some slagging over something, but only Southerners reify their grievance into an culture and political demands.

@ Neil: you already know I think this, but it's worth saying here. Rural voters and Southerners are not stupid. Liberal ideas with a drawl will not gull them, and it's bigoted to think it will. How popular is Morris Dees in the White South? His accent is authentic.

@Karen: Just grow up. Try living in California, Mass, or NY, and hearing the endless smears delivered in Southern accents. Everyone comes in for some slagging over something, but only Southerners reify their grievance into an actual culture and political demands.

@ Neil: you already know I think this, but it's worth saying here. Rural voters and Southerners are not stupid. Liberal ideas with a drawl will not gull them, and it's bigoted to think it will. How popular is Morris Dees in the White South? His accent is authentic.

Sorry for the double post. Slow system.

Please everyone remember, as most pundits do not, that "Southerner" is not in fact exclusive to conservative white rural male protestant Southerners.

The majority of our nation's African Americans live in "the South," but somehow they never seem to be counted among "Southerners" when people are talking about politics & things "Southern." I don't think there would be quite the Democratic strength in Congress without its Southern African American representatives.

Also, a huge fraction of the nation's rapidly growing Latino population is not only in "the South," but in fact have been born & grew up here, and they are also Southerners.

A majority or near majority of the population in individual Southern states live in urban or exurban areas, so being "rural" doesn't really count alone.

As a Southerner, I generally agree with Thomas Schaller's view that the best thing for both national and Southern politics would be for the nation's Democrats to realize that they can, in fact, win a majority of the nation's Presidential electoral votes without the South.

(I also suspect that the nation's non-Southern and non-Western Republicans are a bit tired of the maniacally right wing Southern mafia that has had a lock on their party for the last couple of decades.)

Furthermore, it was really bad for the Democrats to keep thinking that in order to campaign for "Southerners", they mainly have to forget about all the liberal and moderate Democrats, and African Americans and Latinos, and just run the most near fake Republican white conservative male Southern candidates or campaigns they can.

That doesn't work, and it looks as fake as it is.

Southern politicians, including liberal Southern politicians, have been reared in a culture of respect for those who serve in the military and those who worship regularly. This attitude of respect, steeped in the politesse that well-bred Southerners absorb by osmosis, appeals not only to fellow Southerners, but plays well in Northern red states as well. Perhaps this is why the last non-Southern Democrat to win a national plurality was in 1960. That Democrat, it is worth noting, had served with distinction in the Navy durin WWII and expressed relatively hawkish views during the campaign.

That having been said, I recall the story about the society matron from Boston who was on an airplane seated next to a sweet young thing from Atlanta. The older lady said, "In Boston, we place all of our emphasis on breeding."

The Georgia gal replied, "Well, down South we think that's a lot of fun, but it ain't all we like to do."

Whoever is to blame for the absurdity that is the American South, the fact is that Democrats have a wonderful chance to take advantage of a crack in the GOP coalition and should do so.

While I think Tom Schaller is brilliant, I disagree with his big idea about ignoring the South. The party that controls this country is the party that has the bigots on its side. With anti-gay bigotry losing its punch and anti-Mexican bigotry being fanned inadvertently by the White House, it looks like the bigot vote will be a tossup in 2008.

Rather than Whistling Past Dixie, I think we should seize the best chance in 40 years to smash apart the business-bigot axis. Southerners being what they are, it will take one of their own to act as Pied Piper. (John Edwards' "I wish I didn't hate gays but that's how my papa raised me" stance is a perfect example of the strategy to be used.)

If we can tip the bigot vote to dislodge the GOP in Washington and in some southern states, we may have a chance to smash it apart. Perhaps some high-profile investigations into election tampering by suburban megachurches would be a good place to start...

I am from Alabama, so may I speak on behalf of my "bigoted" compatriots. The cultural intolerance is actually at least as strong in the reverse. I moved to Baltimore and had a date with a new guy. The first thing the guy said to impress me was that he was talking with a Black friend at work about the likelihood that my brother was in the KKK. (Nevermind that Alabama is the only state where that is actually impossible since the Southern Poverty lawsuit closed all chapters.) When I went to college I was heckled and my purse was thrown into a toilet, presumably because of my Southern accent. Which I lost to a British accent in a temporary overreaction. What happened to me was not isolated. I can count on one hand the number of TV shows where Southerners were not portrayed negatively. I find Southern politics frustrating, myself, which is why I left, but Southerners are mostly sweet people. And as they say, "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar."

Edwards was raising "electability" issue

This thrust by Edwards is clearly directed primarily against Senato Hillary Clinton.

Hillary will probably get the nomination and would, I think, be an excellent president. Unfortunately, of the three top candidates, she is the only one with a significant chance of losing the general election. There is just no way to predict the extent and effect of the negativity factor.

So Obama or Edwards should be the nominee. I favor Obama as an inspiring agent of change with potential for greatness. I doubt that the risk of racist voting is in any way comparable to the risk of negativity votes against Clinton.

homer www.altara.blogspot.com

I was born and lived in South Carolina for 27 years, and have lived in Boston for the last 7.

I can tell you with certainty that in general southerners do not give a shit what Ted Kennedy is up to, what Californians put on their sandwiches, or what the rest of the country thinks about NASCAR or country music. The vilification of "Taxachusetts" and San Francisco and the like has largely been a function of right wing talk radio, wingnut welfare writers, and, since 1968, base politicians seeking any possible edge in the game.

I agree with skeptic and others regarding Tom Schaller. Rather than "ignoring" the South, the Democrats should stop trying to pander the right-wing religious extremists who, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, make up only part of the population of the South and who will never vote for a progressive or even moderate Democrat no matter what.

The south is no more homogeneous than any other region of the country. There have are plenty of progressives in the South (Edwards himself is a perfect example). Additionally, the south has large African American and Hispanic populations who have not yet fully flexed their political muscles. Remember it was only because Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris were able to disenfranchise thousands of African-Americans from the Florida voter roles that enabled Dubya to claim victory in the 2000 election (and even with these thousands of disenfranchised voters, the evidence strongly indicates that a statewide recount would swung the election to Al Gore).

I agree with skeptic and others regarding Tom Schaller. Rather than "ignoring" the South, the Democrats should stop trying to pander the right-wing religious extremists who, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, make up only part of the population of the South and who will never vote for a progressive or even moderate Democrat no matter what.

I agree that Democrats have to stop pandering to "old south" coalition, but let's not be fooled. A progressive candidate is going to lose the majority of southern states. The only real hope is to peel off those in which migration from the north is altering the election balance like VA, NC or FLA.

The fact that Edwards couldn't carry his home state or his home county in 2004 speaks volumes about his ability to appeal to Southerners.

Dem candidates for President who campaign in the South are wasting their time and money.

i can appreciate the resentment that non-southerners are beginning to feel about the attitude of southerners. my reaction: you've earned every stinking bit of it. i grew up in the 50s and 60s, a native tennessean. sure, we had our problems, but whatever they were, they weren't helped by the patronizing attitude of those from the 'civilized regions'. just consider what it was, to have been a white southerner and ruled over by the best and brightest of the kennedy white house. if you think that unwarranted superiority is a thing of the past, consider the condescending dismissal of an education gotten at any state school south of the ohio and east of the mississippi that comes as second nature to the typical manhattanite or san franciscan. again, my response: eat it!

Edwards may be slightly more competitive than Clinton nationally, but that's not saying much (Clinton's negatives are high and will not decline that much).

Edwards has taken a host of very liberal positions, and those positions, regardless of his accent, would lose the general election. "There's no war on terror" is a pretty awful message to bring to the electorate--an overreaction against Bush's politics. Add to that every other liberal position he's recently assumed (which don't seem too genuine when you compare them to earlier positions in his political career), and you've got another Kerry--except this time, one who seems to have betrayed his region as opposed to being a fulfillment of it.

Jim,
Be fair! There are people in every region who are prejudiced against people from other regions. It's a univeral human trait: we don't like people who are different from us. And no one can take full historical blame ("you hated us first!").

Jim: As a Tennesseean growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, you might want to think twice before downplaying your state's problems and speaking ill of the outside forces brought to bear. For the record, the problem was institutionalized racism and oppression, and the outside forces were the federal government--in belated support of constitutional guarantees--and self-sacrificing citizens, who in some cases sacrificed a great deal. Between your hurt feelings and the elimination of Jim Crow by "patronizing outsiders," I'll go with the latter and advise you to take a cold shower till the feeling passes.

First of all, the notion that people from the South won't vote for Northerners is, at best, unproven. Reagan won the South, twice, and he was born in Illinois and lived in California for most of his adult life. The first President Bush may have lived in Texas for a long time, but he was born in the Northeast and acted like it. He did pretty well in the South, too.

The South is more conservative, which is why the more-liberal party has struggled there over the last few election cycles. But I suspect a Northern Conservative could whip a Southern leftist in the South.

Oh, and Edwards does sound like a Marxist, even with that twang.

Of course, let us not forget the racism/ethnic hatred that flowed from the South during the Dukakis race. As a campaign worker, I remember the a certain Country singer decrying "Vote for that guy, I can't even "pronouce" his name." Unfortunately, there was no "Macaca" moment back then, but the antisemitism against his wife was always mentioned after his being "foreign."

rich,

i'll concede your point on de jure racism. we needed what happened (and most of it was at the hand of another southerner by the way), but it went deeper than that. even in those black days, the majority of white southerners didn't own klan outfits or lynching ropes and would have considered it unchristian to mistreat anyone because of their color.

if your awareness doesn't extend past the seventies, it is difficult to adequately explain how we were held in contempt by the cognoscenti of other parts. lbj's mistreatment by the camelot clan owed more to his origins than his education or his manners. and it was typical. we are a proud people and we don't easily forget those kinds of slights.

looking back now, with the plethora of expose works that have surfaced, the insult is doubly painful. for all their good points (and there were some things i admired about jfk), the kennedys (and their sycophants) were fundamentally as loutish, as cruel, as stupid as any southerner could possibly have been.

i guess we've never been able to get over that hypocrisy.

@jim filyaw I grew up in the south too (rural Georgia) and practically all of my family still lives there. While those "patronizing outsiders" were hurting your feelings in the 60s, my school district still had separate schools for blacks & whites. It didn't de-segregate until 1970(!), which also happens to be the year the first private school opened there? Coincidence? Fortunately I didn't start school until 1974, and my favorite teacher of all time (1st grade) was black. A lot -- a LOT -- has changed for the better down there, but I still hear n-word jokes when I go back to visit. At least now interracial dating isn't stigmatized the way it was when I was in high school in the 80's.

derek,

whether you believe it or not, white southerners neither invented or ever held a monopoly on racism.

my point? apples and oranges. forget race problems for a moment. this is about the congenital comtempt white southerners experienced at the hands of white easterners, midwesterners, and the west coasters for decades. that lingers.

i would suggest that the next dukakis or kerry who wants to be taken seriously below the ohio acknowledge that and apologize for it.

but then, i am assuming that non-southerners have seen the light. maybe i'm wrong.

p.s.: next to supercilious yankees, the next most irritating things are masochistic southerners eager to acknowledge their inferiority by claiming ownership of every ill of which southerners were ever accused. please! if self abasement is your cup of tea, include me out.

It would be a lot easier to take Southerners complaints seriously if they didn't keep electing morons like Zell Miller, Tom Coburn, John Cornyn, Saxby Chambliss, Jim Bunning, Elizabeth Dole....

yeah,

we could use a larry craig, a john boehner, a denny hastert or two.

William T. Sherman - American Hero.

F*** the South!!!!!!!!

Paul et. al.

I did a long post on this whole hypothesis over at www.thedemocraticstrategist.org. Short version: There's not much evidence that Edwards has any special juice among southerners. Maybe he actually does, but it hasn't much shown up in any empirically verifiable way.

Attention southerners: Don't like be treated as retard hillbillies by northeastern elites. There is a simple solution. Next time you see a guy in a confederate flag t-shirt, beat him senseless.

I wonder, does the southern man believe the Vichy French are also unjustly caricatured?

Jim Filyaw:

Do you have anything to say about the South's noxious regional bigotry other than "other people used to be mean to us, now it's our turn!"?

As a New Yorker, I'm sick of being told I'm not a real American. I'm sick of the presumption that I drink lattes, ride in limos, and have ever used the phrase "flyover country". And I'm really sick of the mindset that even if any of the above projections were true, they would actually matter!

The tirades against my city, its inhabitants, and their values, as expressed by some of my so-called countrymen from the South, read like translations of Al Qaeda propaganda. Because let's face it, everybody who hates America's big city northeastern culture hates it for the same reasons. Too much modernism, too much diversity, too many opportunities. Too much of what America really means.

I lived in the deep south for a time long ago. I didn't find southerners bigoted, ignorant or country. The big cultural difference seemed to me that they were, well, SOUTHERN--sort of Mediterranean: very concerned with dressing up, with appearances, manners and social skills, with being nice and being smooth, more formal and less forthright than the general American norm, social, outgoing and friendly. I'm ambivalent about that since it's alien to my own Northernness, but I still find that Sourthernness pleasant and comforting. Also not that Edwards has a good Southern accent rather than the nasty nasal variety: R-less Southern rather than R-full Southern

Southerners are mostly sweet people, huh?
And a lynching is a Sunday-school picnic, too.
Was Jim Crow a personal friend of your's. Karen and Paula? Sounds like you know him really well.