The "Southern Strategy": the Democrats' Excuse for Losing

This is my response to a column by Byron Williams at "The Huffington Post." As you may recall, Arianna Huffington was a conservative before her husband decided that he preferred men. I guess such an experience is enough to turn most any woman into a left-wing nutjob.

This article is so chockablock with B. S. that time does not permit a full rebuttal. The fact that Rev. Williams is from Oakland, California helps explain why he wrote such a political fable. (Not to mention that he needs a remedial course in spelling and grammar.)

"The "Southern Strategy" has proven so effective for Republicans that, except for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Democratic presidential nominees have all but written off the South as part of their electoral strategy."

Oh yeah? Then why was Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen the 1988 Democratic nominee for vice president? Why was Tennesseean Algore the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee? (If Algore had carried his home state, he would have been elected, but that's another story.) And why was North Carolina Sen. John Edwards the 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president?

Someone needs to tell the good pastor that the White Citizens Council has been defunct for some years now.

"Though it began in earnest with the Nixon presidential campaign in 1968, Ronald Reagan crystallized the Southern Strategy in 1980."

Nixon must have had a pretty lousy "Southern strategy" in 1968, since the independent George Wallace carried five Southern states, and the Democrat Hubert Humphrey carried Texas. Nixon clearly had a "national strategy" in 1972, when he carried 49 states. So did Reagan, who carried 44 states in 1980 and 49 states in 1984.

"During the [2003] campaign, lawn signs supporting [Haley] Barbour featured the Confederate flag, which read: 'Keep the flag, change the governor!'"

I followed that campaign quite closely, and I never saw any such signs. Some 64 percent had voted several years earlier to keep our current flag. Even several black-majority counties voted for the current flag.

The "Southern strategy" is one of the basic tenets of the Keepers of Odd Knowledge Society (KOOKS).