The North Shall Rise Again
THE NORTH SHALL RISE AGAIN....John Edwards thinks he has an advantage over Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama because he's from the South and can therefore win votes from all over the country. Paul Waldman explains why he's right:
Part of this is that, to be frank, while people in Rhode Island or Oregon don't look on presidential candidates who come from regions other than their own with suspicion, lots of southerners seem to be reluctant to vote for people who don't share their drawl. Of course, this is never characterized as pathological regional xenophobia — it's just how regular folks think, and there's not supposed to be anything wrong with it.Amen to that. I can't begin to tell you how tired I am of the South's victim complex. Five of our last seven presidents have been from the South and the other two have been from the Southwest — and the reason, as near as I can tell, is that most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And yet, somehow, it's the rest of us who are supposedly intolerant of Southern culture. Feh.....Southerners are always taking offense at people who supposedly look down on them, but to someone who was raised in the Northeast, the idea that southerners are inherently more "real," and more American, than the rest of us is deeply insulting.
And, yes, I've been in a bad mood for the past couple of days. Feh anyway.