Democrats write off the south

NY Times:

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“They don’t need the South to win,” said Thomas F. Schaller, who wrote the book, “Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win Without the South,” and who teaches political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Why would Democrats go after the most rural, least unionized, most racially polarized, most evangelized region in the country?” As proof, Mr. Schaller has cited Representative Harold E. Ford Jr.’s losing Senate race in Tennessee.

But not so fast. The thundering silence from the South may prove nothing more than what should be obvious: when Democrats do not compete, or compete unequally, they lose. Party officials in Tennessee, reflecting on the race in recent days, acknowledged that Mr. Ford was not an ideal candidate for the state, and not just because he was a black politician trying to climb the steep mountain of a white electorate. His own political baggage added significantly to his burden.

Throughout the South, Democrats ceded vast swaths of Congressional territory to Republicans, hardly bothering to show that the party was alive, even in places where such a demonstration might have been welcome. In Louisiana, Democrats barely fought in two Congressional districts where Republican incumbents could have been vulnerable: the Fifth District in the north, represented by a party-switching Republican whose last-minute change infuriated the state’s Democrats two years ago, and the Seventh District in Cajun country to the south, peopled by socially tolerant French Catholics and long represented by Democrats.

Democratic officials in the state say they tried to persuade strong candidates to take up these challenges but found no buyers and evidently no deep bench from which to draw, testimony to the years of national Republican ascendancy.

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The author and the story miss the real reason why Democrats have been failing in the South for the last 50 years. It is national security. As long as they have their head buried in the sand on this issue they will keep losing. The South has rejected the McGovern foreign policy of the Democrats and it is unlikely to ever find it acceptable. With the current Democrats dominated by anti war pukes they will continue to have a tough sell in the south, even if the local candidate is not an anti war puke, because voting for them would empower the anti war pukes. It is those Democrats outside the south who want the US to lose the war in Iraq and want to tie the hands of those fighting the war on terror that are dragging down their party in the south.