The 2008 elections showed the South is one of the nation's biggest political battlegrounds. Then why are the pundits saying the South is now irrelevant? And how many times can they get the story wrong?
by Chris Kromm
Nov. 21, 2008 (Facing South) -- 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" ...
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