Right in this passage here:

Yes, Webb won against George Allen. But consider how favorable the conditions were. He is a native-stock Scots-Irishman. He is a former Republican. He is an ex-Marine who not only fought in Vietnam but has a son who served in Iraq. And Webb's wife is Asian, which matters more than you might think, given that the key Northern Virginia suburban counties that ring Washington, D.C., are about 15 percent Asian now.

Those are just Webb's biographical assets. The state's demography and the national political environment in 2006 were also extremely favorable. Those Northern Virginia suburbs have made Virginia one of the fastest-changing states in the South, and one with the highest median income of any former Confederate state. The 2006 midterm cycle was the best for Democrats since at least 1974, and maybe going back to 1954. Rarely is a party blessed at once with a candidate biography so favorable and a demographic-electoral tailwind so strong. As if all of this were somehow not enough, Webb was the beneficiary of one of the greatest media-electoral windfalls of modern American history: the infamous "macaca" moment. (Though I can't prove the counterfactual, I firmly believe that despite all the other advantages, sans macaca, Webb still loses. Remember: This race was too close to call on election night.)

The point is that Webb-Allen contests are rare in the South, and are sometimes lost even when they do fall into Democrats' laps. It is sobering to remember that even while Webb was winning in Northern Virginia he was losing badly among native white Southerners downstate. Even if Moser joined forces with fellow Southern revivalists like Donna Brazile, Don Fowler and Steve Jarding to recruit 500 Jim Webbs for Southern campaigns at all levels of government -- which would surely help -- it is beyond their powers to produce Democratic tsunamis every two years, not to mention 500 separate macaca moments, one each for those 500 recruits.

Even with scandals weakening their GOP foes, the only places that Webb, Warner and Kaine could have possibly been elected in the last two decades, now that the Southern Strategy is cemented into place, are Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina -- and as a Southern letter writer pointed out, Florida isn't considered a true "Southern" state any more by many white non-Floridians, largely because of the influx of Cubans and Northerners into South Florida.

John Edwards was born in South Carolina, but his political career, short as it was, was possible only in North Carolina and only because he ran as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat and because voters were angry at Lauch Faircloth over his prominent role pushing Clinton's impeachment (and Edwards only beat Faircloth by four points in 1998). Mark Warner also ran and runs as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat in Virginia, as does Tim Kaine, who also uses his faith to reach out to conservative evangelicals. Neither of them have achieved landslides: Warner won the 2001 governor's race by five points, while Kaine won his 2005 gubernatorial election by five points, and his 2001 lieutenant governorship by two.

The devastation of Katrina hit New Orleans hard, whilst largely sparing wealthier Republican suburbs like Jefferson Parish, which had the resources to bounce back much faster than the City itself.

The depopulation of New Orleans has thrown Louisiana to the R column for the next few cycles at least.

Hutman asks:

"In conclusion, who are these people?"

Paid RNC boilerroom trolls and/or Abramoff-style College Republicans.

"Can people really be this dumb? Or are they paid to write this crap?"

Yes and yes.

As a glance through a week's worth of recent letters shows, he is a concern troll of the first water. (He also sounds a lot like the Vashon troll -- or else they're reading from the same script. Check their IP addresses.)

It was about debunking, once and for all, the "Obama is a Muslim terrorist" nonsense.

Obama went into this not to convert Fundies, but to demonstrate the reality of who he is to the millions of people who've received the smear e-mails that Mike Madden so expertly debunked.

You know, you should be taking Joe Conason's advice to Hillary, which is to stop with the undermining and sniping so that you can't be blamed for McCain stealing 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But of course, the single "Editor's Choice" letter you picked from the pile of responses to his post is an angry screed from a Hillary fan who is ignorant of or pretending not to know about Conason's role in saving the Clintons from impeachment and removal, so it's obvious that there's no reaching you.

The AMA thought that socialized medicine would hurt them. Then they found out what naked capitalism, as practiced by the insurance industry, looks like -- and it ain't pretty. That's why we're now seeing Harry and Louise on our TVs again, but this time as advocates for the very stuff they fought tooth and nail fifteen years ago.

Time for single-payer, folks!

This, my friends, is why Obama didn't personally respond like a crazed weasel on meth to every single slight McCain and McCain's fellow travelers like Ron Fournier and Charles Babington threw at him. He was merely letting McCain set up McCain's own gibbet, knot his own rope, and place it around his own neck.

The essence of kung fu and rope-a-dope is to make your opponent do all the work for you -- then, with a few key move, cause your tired foe's house of cards to crumple. (Oh, and speaking of rope-a-dope, guess who was at the DNC in Denver, watching from a skybox? Hint: A picture of him has pride of place in Obama's office.)

When Patrick Buchanan -- Patrick BUCHANAN, never one to cut any black man ANY slack -- called it the greatest convention speech ever, you know Obama did very well indeed.

Ladies and gentlemen, you just heard your next president.