Let The New South Rise

With thanks to Right Democrat, the Institute for Southern Studies has this, from which the following are extracts:

A NEW SOUTH RISING

2008 proved that the South is politically competitive and growing in importance. But the pundits are telling a different story.

On the day before Election Day -- that final moment when candidates decide where they want to make their last case to the voters they want to win the most -- Barack Obama chose to visit three big battleground states: Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.

Since 1968, these Southern states had voted Democratic for president only six times between them. And president-elect Obama was about to ask voters in these states -- all members of the old Confederacy -- to vote the first African-American ever into the White House.

Obama's Southern Strategy worked: the states went blue, and history was made.

But just as Southern Democrats were clinking glasses of sweet tea in celebration, the powerhouses of political punditry -- especially in the North -- made a bizarre move: They turned against the region that had just given one-third of its Electoral College votes to the President-elect.

Ignoring McCain's dominance in, say, the Great Plains and Upper Mountain states -- Obama's most crushing defeats came in Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming -- legions of commentators instead curiously trained their guns on the South, dismissing the region as politically irrelevant, a bastion of red-state conservatism uniquely out of touch with national trends.

Gawker, a popular New York-based website, put a finer point on it: "North Finally Wins Civil War."

SCHALLER RIDES -- AND FALLS -- AGAIN

It's a familiar refrain. The Obama campaign heard it when they first began talking about changing the political map, including putting several Southern states in play. Leading the pack, as always, was the relentless Tom Schaller, the oft-quoted political scientist whose passion for downplaying the South's political significance has frequently put him on the wrong side of history.

Just this past July, Schaller declared with typical bombast in a New York Times column that "Mr. Obama can write off Georgia and North Carolina." That certainly would come as a surprise to Obama, who won N.C. and made McCain fight for the Peach State.

It would also be news to McCain and Sarah Palin, who scheduled seven campaign stops in North Carolina in the final month leading into the election. As for Georgia, McCain is now headed there to help fellow Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, forced into a run-off largely because of the surge of Obama voters.

This wasn't the first time Schaller's "forget the South" thesis was proven wrong. In 2006, Schaller famously declared he was "certain" now-Senator Jim Webb (D) would lose in Virginia. But the string of bad calls and Obama's success in the South hasn't silenced Schaller and the rest of the "write off the South" crowd -- oddly enough, it seems to have emboldened them.

THE REAL LESSONS FROM THE SOUTH

In fact, the 2008 elections provided two important lessons about the South, clear to any willing to see them: First, the South is rapidly changing in a way that makes it a more -- not less -- politically competitive region.

And second, despite the fevered hopes of certain wings of the Northern intelligentsia, the South's political clout is rapidly growing -- making the South a centerpiece of any strategy for national political power.

What sort of Democrat can win in the South? Oh, that sort of Democrat.

But why is someone like that in the Democratic Party at all? For reasons of economic populism and (these days, since the GOP sold out completely) foreign policy realism.

Which are, of course, the right reasons.