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November 10, 2008
The news just keeps getting better.
Here's more about the coming Republican civil war. The outcome won't be nearly as simple as the writer makes it sound, but the signs are encouraging. From the NY Times:
Fear of the politician with the unusual name and look did not end with last Tuesday's vote in this rural red swatch where buck heads and rifles hang on the wall. This corner of the Deep South still resonates with negative feelings about the race of President-elect Barack Obama.What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.
The region's absence from Mr. Obama's winning formula means it "is becoming distinctly less important," said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. "The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics."
That "buck heads and rifles" line is a lazy, ignorant stereotype, so I hope the rest of the research isn't as compromised. Especially this, because reading it is like getting Christmas six weeks early:
By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.
"I think that's absolutely over," said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.
