The More Things Change...

Over at Pottersville, jurrassicpork makes a compelling argument of why the "Southern Strategy" is dead, and why Democrats should be more concerned with the new "Northern Strategy:"

This proposed Northern Strategy is scarier than the Southern Strategy in one important way: Rather than being orchestrated by administration insiders in a re-election year, this is being assembled at the grassroots level on both sides of the Democratic Divide. But since we can rest assured that Obama’s supporters will never have to exercise their own “nuclear option” and exit stage right, the threat seems to be from bitter white people who are so intolerant of a man of color getting into the White House that they’ll run right into the rickety arms of John McCain, quite possibly the whitest man in America.

The examples of Geraldine Ferraro and Harriet Christian and their naked racism may be a small sample but it’s worth noting that this segment of Hillary’s Vagisil Vote both come from New York state, one of the six northern states carried by Hillary in this wearisome primary season.

Alas, I don't see Clinton going out of her way to curb this hostile crowd. After all, she was barely capable of controlling her campaign's message, let alone her subordinates. No, I think Pandora's Racial Box has been opened, and it won't be closed until after November. I turn to the Root's Karen DeWitt for an explanation:

I'm glad to see that real white people are back, the kind that justify the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's paranoia. For a while I assumed those kinds of white people had disappeared into the multiculti, Starbuck-sipping, bilingual, globe-trotting crowd that I routinely run across in our nation's capital—the kind you read about on Stuffwhitepeoplelike.com—the kind I mostly like.

But, now I know that the real white people were just on the down low. They had been stifled by political correctness, hushed into inarticulateness by an inability to use ethnic slurs and openly call a spade, well, a spade. The Democratic presidential contest has liberated them.

Once again, they're free to be authentic, and it has reminded me of why, growing up in the de facto segregated city of Dayton, Ohio, I was wary of strange white people, assuming them to be unpredictable and potentially violent. I didn't think of these people as inherently evil. I knew they were ordinary human beings, accustomed to a skin privilege they refused to—and continue to refuse—to acknowledge.

I think the thing we all have to realize is that "South" is not synonymous with "racist." Racists exist all over this country, and in different variations; from the one who use the "N-word" with regularity to the one who proudly display their confederate flag to the one who tout the "athletic" black sportsman and in the same breath praise the "smart" white one.

Not all of the so-called "Dixiecrats" left the Democratic Party, as this primary season has proven.