I think the newfound infatuation with Dean is wrong headed. It may make great pie in the sky fantasy to say that Howard Dean is what won the election, but the fact is that if some of the money that Dean wasted had been more intelligently directed, we might well have won an small handful of congressional seat, or perhaps even a Senate seat in Tennessee. And yes, Harold Ford would make an excellent party chairman.

There is certainly nothing wrong with rebuilding voter files and rebuilding party organizations in states like mine -- if, and only if, you have infinite amounts of money. But we don't. We have a very finite amount of money. And given that fact, and the fact that now, and in the foreseeable future, campaigns run on cash, spending one cent on rebuilding the Texas Democratic party apparatus at the expense of winning a congressional seat somewhere else is foolish.

I'm personally elated that Nick won. I gave him the max as did many others I know. He's a great guy who got a horribly raw deal in redistricting (as did my friend and former Congressman Max Sandlin).

However, I recognize that while his victory is sweet, I suspect that it is short lived. I wish you the best of luck in Ft. Bend County, but I suspect that when his opponent isn't a write in candidate, that he'll have trouble getting reelected even with the not insubstnatial advantage of incumbency.

Here in my small county in Northeast Texas, we're rebuilding the party, too. But rather than using national money, we're using local money. I see no need to divert money from a national congressional race than can be won to reinvigorate either of our local party organizations.

Ya'll can bitch and moan about the DLC all you want too, but it seems to me that it gets awfully hard to count to count to 270 - the number of electoral votes needed to capture the Presidency -- without winning something in the south.

Remember that the last Democratic President of the United States not from the south (assuming that you consider Missouri to be at least a nominally southern state)? If you do, you probably only remember it from your history books. It was FDR.

The odd notion that the moderate wing of the Democratic party is vestigial and should be cast off at the first oppotunity is insanity. Pure and simply insanity.

Look, Leiberman is a royal pain in the ass. No one is more sanctimonious or pompous. How anyone as allegedly intelligent as Al Gore could have picked such an idiot as a running mate is beyond me. Nor is his conservatism newfound. He's been a tort "reformer" for years, even before the Republican discovered the issue, putting the interests of insurance companies ahead of those of consumers and families.

But like it or not, he got elected and it's a 51/49 Senate. And that means that if he wants his ass kissed, that we've got to pucker up till the cows come home. At least for two more years.

If in 2008 we either pick up or loose at least one seat, then we can tell the no good SOB not to let the door hit him in the ass on the way out. But until then, he gets what he wants. It's a simple as that.

Several points. First, I think that the author's premise, that the Democrats should write off the South, is little short of idiocy. The Democratic party cannot "write off" the fastest growing region in the U.S. -- one with approximately 50 electoral votes. To me (but then again, I'm one of those dumb southerners), to state the proposition is enough to discredit it.

As as for my State of Texas, demographic changes are making in, gradually, more competitive for Democrats. With strong financial help from trial lawyer affiliated PACs, the Democrats picked up five seats (out of 150) in the Texas House this year, a record gain.

However, giving the devil his due, the author is, in my opinion, absolutely correct that a degree of unreconstructed racism exists in the south, perhaps to a greater extent than elsewhere, than makes it difficult for an otherwise qualified candidate like Harold Ford to win.

But I must take exception to the author's contention that "Richard Nixon began the process of turning the South Republican by appropriating George Wallace's appeal to disaffected working-class whites." I would argue, as did Lyndon Johnson at the time to Sen. Richard Russell, that the process began with Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Don't get me wrong, I think that this guy is a crazy as a loon, too, but has it ever occurred to you guys that there are significant numbers of voters out there who are religious and who have been mislead by folks like this, but who, rightly or wrongly, feel genuinely threatened. When you ridicule this guy, many of those threatened people can't see the distinction and think that you are ridiculing them. And many of these threatened religious voters, while somewhat conservative, are fed up with divisive politics and do know that the Bible only mentions homosexuality twice, but poverty hundreds of times. They could, with a bit of hand holding, be Democratic voters.

Perhaps the best response would be that we're sorry that you think that we're going to do that, we assure you that's not true, even if we did, it would be unconstitutional, but let us demonstrate to you just how fair and even handed we'll be to believers and non-believers alike.

In other words, don't attack the man who advances the concerns of those who could eventually vote for our candidates, even if he is a fool.