Why do Democrats do so poorly with rural voters?

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250. J'Admets -

Last edited Sat Jan 26, 2013, 10:06 AM - Edit history (2)

I was expressing just one (particularly jaundiced) view among many that I have of the many American souths. I am actually a transplanted Yankee who for 30 years has lived in Virginia, the capitol of the Old Confederacy, and I like the place and most of its people. But, here as across most of the rest of the region I find there is a stubborn and imbedded conservatism -- a reaching backwards, a longing for assumed virtues of the past -- that lends itself here because of local history to an insurgent GOP and widespread Cantor style Teabaggery.

That having been said, the southerners who grow up here who fight the old ways, who have by personal grace caught onto the tail of the universal will for freedom and equality -- these people are fearless and have a nobility beyond my comprehension. They are heroes and I love them, and they make this a wonderful place.

I guess, looking back on my post, that what I was expressing was resistance to what I took to be a suggestion that the Democratic Party should somehow further accommodate itself to the generally more conservative cultural ways of the south. I created a cardboard cutout of the rural South as something beyond redemption and waved it around; like the Scarecrow, I hoped to wave off the Triangulators and the Third-Wayers who might descend on this idea of bringing the South into the Party by bringing the Party into Dixie. That was unfair and probably mistaken, it is an old argument, and I apologize.