Letters to the Editor
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Virginia -- not a Bellweather yet
For the record, Doraville, GA isn't that Southern. Like its neighbor, Chamblee, it has absorbed a great many immigrants from SE and E Asia, and is not far from a corridor where most peope are from southern Mexico.
Virginia has a long way to go before becoming Cleveland or St. Louis. Webb promises to break a streak of truly weak Seantors: Warner, Robb, Allen. And the Dem governors from Wilder to Kaine would be considered conservative in real bellweather states like Washington, Ohio, or Michigan. And Ollie North happened not that long ago.
Outside of NoVA, Virginia is still stuck with the neo-Feudalism and hardshell Protestant conservativism of the traditional South. Midwestern conservatives can be dragged kicking & screaming toward something new, but Southerners won't even do that. And although NoVA is more liberal than say, metro Atlanta, it's still too Southern for a lot of people who live across the Potomac. When stroll down Clarendon Road in Arlington, I start getting flashbacks of living in Atlanta.
May be 10 years from now, Virginia will be more obviously "purple", but until then this boosterism about a new Virginia just seems like a new version of Washingtonian myopia--usually from people who crossed a bridge into DC.