The Icing on the Political Cake

Not only did we make history on this day last week, we elected the better team to move us forward. And we unearthed some rather ugly facts about the electorate which hails from what I call America's red vein.

Fear of the politician with the unusual name and look did not end with last Tuesday’s vote in this rural red swatch where buck heads and rifles hang on the wall. This corner of the Deep South still resonates with negative feelings about the race of President-elect Barack Obama.

The New York Times provides us with some visual imagery. No offense intended to hunters and fishermen (or is it fisherpeople?) who happen to have supported Obama I'm sure.

The idea of a "waning" South has me as excited as the outcome of the election. And it's about damn time.

The region’s absence from Mr. Obama’s winning formula means it “is becoming distinctly less important,” said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. “The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.”

[...]

Alabama, for example, experienced a heavy black turnout and voted slightly more Democratic than in 2004, but the state over all gave 60 percent of its vote to Mr. McCain. (Arkansas, however, doubled the margin of victory it gave to the Republican over 2004.)

[...]

By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.

That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues.

All I can do is applaud and shout, "good riddance" to that negative and racist influence. I do not understand how some of these people even get through the day. What a miserable and pathetic life.

One white woman said she feared that blacks would now become more “aggressive,” while another volunteered that she was bothered by the idea of a black man “over me” in the White House.