For shame! Or perhaps they were a little too wide to support your thesis?

The guy's name is Katon Dawson. Which shortened would be...Kate. Isn't that like...a girl's name? And aren't Republicans supposed to be these, like, macho, manly men who like guns and blowing shit up and war and stuff? How do you get a name like Kate, er, Katon and be a macho, manly man who leads the Greedy Bastard Party against liberal wimps like Obama and Co.? I'm just asking is all. How can anyone be a self-respecting Republican when the leader of the party is a man with a girl's name? Just seems like it'd be a problem. Also, I saw a picture of him on "Countdown" last night and he has, like...funny hair. Like someone drew a picture of hair on his head. Hard taking the GOP seriously after the election anyway. Now they want to put up some guy who proudly wears the name Kate. And as his co-chair, they'll find that grown man named Sue.

I just think it's a problem.

How about Saxby Chambliss. I mean, seriously, "SAXBY"?

I got too hung up over how he wanted to put an end to the "white only" club precedence, but the author of this article made it sound so scandalous. I read the article linked. This guy, honky as he might be, was working on ending segregation at this club. Isn't that the whole "working within the system to make it better" thing? Or am I missing something here?

I find myself very liberal and there are very few people who wear GOP buttons I get along with. But come on, this is stretching it here.

This guy, honky as he might be, was working on ending segregation at this club.

Ya, after being a member for 12 years and doing nothing, he suddenly had an epiphany and decided to try to change it this past August when gearing up for his run at the chairmanship. Right. Give me a break.

Tennessee is one of only four states where John McCain received a higher percentage of the vote than George W. Bush did in 2004. Nashville, however, has been solidly Democratic since the days of its most prominent political figure, Andrew Jackson.

Senator Obama polled about five percentage points higher in Davidson County than Senator Kerry did in 2004. Only one Republican has been elected to any county office in Nashville during my adult lifetime--a highly regarded Chancery Court judge who had been appointed by a Republican governor and who had served with distinction. That was 34 years ago.

I understand that states in the Deep South are racist, but I'd like to know if the younger people in those states vote like their elders.

I think it should also be pointed out that whites' support of John Kerry in the Deep South was also startlingly low.

And I'd also like to know what surveys say about white support of Democratic and Republican candidates. For example, do they say they are voting for the GOP because of its perceived pro-military stance, its support of cultural conservative issues, or are they still morons pissed off about the mid-1960s Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

I really think more numbers are needed for the story. It contains a lot of implied assumptions -- whites who see lots of blacks are voting primarily for racial reasons and they somehow think all those African-Americans will change life as they know it if their side wins.

Shalom,

ZWrite

Why are we making the issue all about what demographic he or she is from. Is that really what it's about? Are we just looking for the right white person or the right black person? Should we look beyond these things when we are looking for a leader? The liberal illuminati did just win because they chose a black person. We need look beyond that.

I was just about to go into a history of Nashville political leanings when I read John's letter. "The bluing" that's spreading to Virgina etc. is already here, and has been for quite some time. Come visit, it's a nice place.

Or, I should say, it's probably not only racism. As everyone knows, higher incomes correlate to republican votes. I don't know where I'd find the data to back this up, but it seems likely that this holds with relative, as well as absolute income. Since states with high black populations probably have their lowest income levels predominantly among blacks, whites, even whites who would be considered poor in other areas, are boosted up the income ladder to somewhere in the middle.

Because the democratic party has a reputation as being the party of the poor (deserved or not), these faux middle classes vote republican because they "don't want their taxes going to deadbeats" - even though the reality is that it's the taxes of the more prosperous northern and coastal regions that is transferred to rural areas, black and white both.

...also had a governor named Carroll Campbell. So I suppose that state has some sort of tradition of Republican males with female names. (If I recall correctly, when Campbell was a congressman in the 1980s, the Almanac of American Politics once described him as an example of "blow-dry conservatism," a phrase I still love.)

But getting back to more serious things, the gist of this column is correct. As long as Republican strength is concentrated in a few extremely insular southern states that don't reflect the sociological changes of the nation as a whole, it will continue to recede. In sports terms, the Republicans have retreated into being the party of the Southeastern Conference (of the nine states that have SEC institutions, only Florida went for Obama); if things continue, the GOP will be limited to the SEC West (Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi). Unfortunately for Republicans, national politics and college football are two entirely different entities.

When the Democrats were similarly solid in the south a century ago, they had other areas to turn to for national support -- first the midwest agrarian populism of William Jennings Bryan, then the northeast urban ethnics who backed Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt. With the Democrats continuing to make gains in the mountain states and west, not to mention some states of the changing south, the GOP may find itself with no place to go unless it makes some major philosophical changes (e.g., eschewing social issues).