By having candidates in the South like Ford, doesn't that mean that is where the battlefield is? Far away from Democratic safe ground?

I am one of that rare breed, a Southern Yellow Dog Democrat. So I find Tom Schaller's suggestion that the party should ignore the South as disheartening and wrong-headed as I find James Carville's suggestion that Harold Ford should replace Howard Dean as party chair.

Dr. Schaller is also pretty condescending in his observation that "non-Southerners" are leading the charge to revitalize the Southern bloc of the Democratic party. Yes, many people have moved south from less hospitable northern and western climates, seeking better weather and increased employment opportunities. And some of those new southerners have worked to rebuild the southern wing of the party. But that doesn't mean that progressivism is dead among those of us who were born here, or that all white southerners must be de facto racists, bigots, hicks and evangelicals. Many of us have worked long and hard to keep the party alive here, without much help from party leadership.

Republicans spent 40 years enacting their "Southern Strategy" while the Democratic party dismantled its operations in the South and starved the state and local parties of resources to win "strategic" races in other regions. So it shouldn't be surprising that it's going to take longer than one or two election cycles to rebuild the Democratic party here. But surrendering the South to the Republicans, as Dr. Schaller suggests, is divisive and dismissive--two things that the Democratic Party can ill afford to be if it truly wants to govern as the best choice for all Americans.

The pattern is there all right, but please don't try to make it fit an old and increasingly wrong stereotype about the South. There are some valuable eletoral votes there, although maybe not as many as Carville would have us believe.

As you say yourself, it is because the South is more dominated by its rural culture that it tends to vote conservative.

But the South did not produce Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, or hardly any of the neocon crowd. And even W himself and George Allen are faux, wannbe Southerners.

And why is it that when rural white Southerners vote in a bloc that necessarily means that they are more racist than rural white Northerners who also vote in a bloc? There were rural counties in Pennsylvania that went 70% for Rick Santorum last week. Yes, Santorum!! Last week!!

The North-South divide is there, but if we focus on that entirely we will miss the real political demographics at work today, and we risk alienating voters in key, urbanizing swing states like Florida, Virginia, and yes even Tennessee.

Because it is still part of the country!

How can a party tell an entire region of the country that “we don’t care if you vote for us”? That’s the same as saying “we don’t care about you”.

The core message of the Democratic Party should be “we care about you all”.

$0.02

Not included in Schaller's assessment of why Ford lost was this: he offered white homophobes/Christian zealots exactly what the GOP offered, but did not offer what the GOP doesn't: populist economics. If you have representation from the GOP that whores for business and kicks minorities of all stripes in the teeth, why vote for someone just as in bed with big business who hates gays but is black?

I bet Ford could have won if he wasn't a complete asshole to the poor and middle class. He offered the people he was pandering to no alternative. White Christians in TN are, on the whole, poor. Had Ford had a populist economic message, coupled with his distasteful gay-baiting and Christian bumper stickers, he might have won. Instead, he was the complete right-wing package, sucking up to big business so much that there was no reason for the rubes not to vote for the white guy.

Of course Carville likes Ford precisely because he's a whore for the banks, etc. - exactly the constituency that loves Carville's clients, like Clinton and Schumer: kinder, gentler vampires.

While castigating Carville for hanging onto an old way of doing business, you have also made the same mistake. It is no longer relevant to divide the nation by geographical regions, and definately not by large regions, i.e. "the northern states","the midwest", "the coasts" etc...

One of Karl Rove's good ideas was to crunch data and determine where the people are with pinpoint accuracy. Data such as car purchasing trends, average household income, marriage status, and so on.

It is better to focus on areas where there is the most potential for voter flip. These undecideds and potential new voters are your real target.

Instead of a "get the midwest" paradigm, democrats should be focusing on a "get the married couple from the suburbs with a median income of $60,000" strategy.

Dean should continue with his 50 state strategy. Dems should shut down the conveyor the Republicans have been using to funnel Northern tax receipts to the Southern tax cheats.

Sadly and ironically, the author simply advocates a mirror image of the divisive GOP strategies that he criticizes. If those tactics are wrong and divisive, then certainly the inherent inclusiveness of Dean's 50 state strategy is the correct response to them.

Yes, it's worth building the party in the south, because the south is part of this country. Now I wonder, if big cities and strong unions are such strongholds of "blue" strength, maybe the Democratic party's Southern Strategy should focus on re-building the urban infrastructure and economies of the south, and unionizing the labor force. It seems Florida and North Carolina are always poised to tip blue on the strength of their cities, what if the same could be said for Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina too?

We all need the South. It is part of this country. But, here's the key, we don't need it tomorrow.

What we need to do is seed it with progress. Fight not for a Senate seat but to ensure that kids still get taught modern science and that they grow up respecting all human beings a little more than their parents did. Racism is still a fact in the South... but generation by generation, it's falling away, and progress will win in the end. It could, however, stand to be hurried a little.

That needs to be the priority for all of us, not just as Democrats but as human beings, to ensure that progress persists and not just that Progressives are elected. Once the South's children are raised on equal footing with the children of the rest of the country, we won't be able to see a difference on the electoral map. It'll just be the area you go for grits.