Pity the Racist Deep South

Did you vote for John McCain?

If so, you are to be pitied, says Dwight Lewis in today's Tennessean:

Pity the poor, Deep South, and that includes our great state of Tennessee, along with Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana and Arkansas.

For the most part, they remain deep red and hardly wanted any part of President-elect Barack Obama's landslide victory.

"One of the main lessons, in terms of patterns, is the isolation of the Deep South," David A. Bositis, senior political analyst for the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told me by phone yesterday. "The South is being isolated from the rest of the country.

"In most other parts of the country, Obama got the majority of white votes or significantly more than Sen. John Kerry did in 2004. In the Deep South states, Obama generally got less of the white vote than Kerry did.''

...

There were a few exceptions, Bositis noted; one of those here in Nashville, where Obama defeated Republican Sen. John McCain, 154,148 to 99,731.

...

"And, if they look, the people in the Deep South will find that among the New England states, there's not a single member of the U.S. House who is a Republican. ... People like Marsha Blackburn may be confronting a country that isn't buying into those old Southern values anymore ... values such as fundamentalist religion, militarism, anti-unionism, negative feelings about race and civil rights, low taxes and spending, except money that they can mooch off.

Yes, pity the poor South. But you get exactly what you deserve if you don't get with the right program.

This drivel is what passes for post-election analysis in the Tennessean.

I, for one, can say with confidence that I voted for McCain and am not a racist. I just didn't feel the need to waste my vote on an unqualified, naive, vague "change" agent simply to mitigate the white guilt that I am supposedly burdened with. I voted for McCain because I think he's a honorable and decent man, and I agree with him more often than not on the issues. I can't say for sure if Obama is honorable or decent, and I wholeheartedly disagree with him on almost every issue.

Aren't those perfectly rational, non-racist reasons to vote for, or against, a candidate?

Meanwhile, many "enlightened" Obama supporters struggle to articulate why they voted for him. All they knew is that it was time for a "change." Or worse, they thought Barack Obama would put gas in their car and pay their mortgage.

We'll see how that turns out.

I'd enthusiastically vote for a qualified, conservative African-American candidate if the opportunity presented itself. Michael Steele comes to mind, and would be an excellent nominee for the Republicans in 2012.

Do I have to wait until then to redeem myself as a respectable human being?

UDPATE: Thanks to my friend Ken at Blue Collar Muse for linking to this post. Please visit his site to get his thoughts on the pathetic, wretched condition of the Deep South.