Southerners Only Need Apply?

SOUTHERNERS ONLY NEED APPLY?….I sure hope that Democrats don’t pay too much attention to “insiders” with advice like this:

Reeling from their party’s loss in the presidential election, some key Democratic financiers and strategists say they have learned a clear lesson: Next time around, no Northeasterners need apply.

….”We have to be very careful about the kind of candidate that we nominate and where that candidate comes from,” said Scott Falmlen, executive director of the Democratic Party in North Carolina, where [Michael] Easley won in a landslide Tuesday despite Kerry’s lopsided loss there to President Bush. “This party has got to get in a position where it does not write off an entire section of the country.”

That’s a little rich coming from a guy who apparently wants to write off the presidential ambitions of every Democrat except those from the promised land of the South. What’s more, it’s bad advice for several reasons:

• There are practically no Democratic governors or senators left in the South. We simply can’t limit our choice every four years to a tiny handful of guys from Arkansas and Virginia.

• For the foreseeable future, the South is lost to the Democratic party and we should stop wasting time moaning about it. Regionally speaking, the upper Midwest, the Ohio valley, the Mississippi river states, and the southwest should be our targets of choice.

• Al Gore and Jimmy Carter were both from the South, and it didn’t help them. Nominating a southerner is no panacea, and instead of pandering to a region that has no intention of supporting their candidates anyway, Democrats would be better served figuring out how to make candidates from their strongholds acceptable to more of the country.

Besides, take a look at the home states of the last seven men elected to the presidency: Texas, Arkansas, Texas, California, Georgia, California, Texas. Not a single one from farther north than the 34th parallel. For practical purposes, more than two-thirds of the country has been disenfranchised from the presidency, held hostage to the electoral desires of the deep South.

It’s time to put a stop to that. Democrats do need to broaden their appeal, but they need to do it with a stronger vision and a stronger message, not by blindly nominating someone with the right accent.