It has been pointed out here that the reason Bill Clinton was as successful as he was is because he is a southerner and therefore his response to the harangue over his personal - and private - life was couched in a vernacular which speaks to everyone from the bottom to the top, rather than the other way around. This is why southern politicians tend to dominate politics and win the White House. This is why Democrats are seen as "elitist" - because so damned many of them actually are and don't even know it. John Kerry's absurd goose hunt is living proof, as is Howard Dean's "NASCAR" comments, that these guys are utterly devoid of clue and don't really think it's all that important anyway. How better to kick your potential convert in the nuts than to make him feel "condescended to"? Bill Clinton knew this from the inside, and was aware enough to be masterful at it. To be able to speak on the level of the people you are addressing, and actually know what you're talking about,and know they know you know, is a gift in any station of life; For a politician it is more than a gift; it is a necessity.

What struck me as truly sad about this failure to recognize the regional and cultural differences between Americans (which is made worse by the fact that Democrats at least concern themselves with foreign cultures and diversity enough to know how to address an Arab or a Frenchman for god's sake!)is that Mann, in the end, simply pronounces us DOA, severed in the middle by the color purple. Dependent lividity it's called. White on top, purple on the bottom. And the reason is touched upon by a few letter writers who have grown up in areas not exactly "metro" and not entirely rural, either. I was born and raised in a segregated southern city in the late 40's through the late 50's (Washington, DC, which desegregated exactly halfway through that decade while I watched dispassionately, not knowing what was about to happen next). I then was dragged, kicking and screaming, to the Maryland suburbs, which were far more "metro" than the D.C.-Fredericksburg (VA) axis of my family. I watched those two cities, surrounded and also joined together by agrarianism, absorbed into a hideous metropolis, and while I took "my stand" and fought my own lost cause against the Second Wave of Northern Agression, the rest of my cousins migrated further and further into southern Maryland and Tidewater Virginia, where our Indian great great grandmother had lived, and became more and more entrenched in their "homeland" ways to the point where now one of them, who I jokingly refer to in person as the "Grand Dragon" tells me "Down here in southern Maryland we have our own peculiar brand of politics." He lives in Virginia, connected to southern Maryland by the Nice Bridge, where the 301 connects those interchangeable areas. And he is right. They are "refractory as mountain gorillas" and it will take some rapproachment by a Clintonesque character, regardless of party, to bring them back into the stream of critical thinking. They do believe, as Mann does, that there were armed takeovers of college campuses in the 60's - it is all in the impression one carries, and Mann rightly points out that mythology is what drives most of these people to the right, and makes them able to stomach a Connecticut Yankee (or a California beach bum) pretending to be a cowboy. It FEELS better to them, even if they know, on some level, that it violates their very Christian foundations. There is something stronger than the pull of Jesus and it is the preternatural terror of a collapse into chaos. They feel that on the periphery, they feel that in the rhetoric of the Left, and so they recoil and clump together and feel strong - and because of fear, they are, for the moment, actually stronger.

Washington, DC, was an agrarian's capital city. This is the middle ground we have lost, this is where the dependent lividity is to be found, in that space between "metro" and "homeland." God help us. The patient has already got the rigors.