Enough stereotypes for you? Because it's also true that I'm of
Irish Catholic descent, was born and raised in New Jersey--state motto:
"Oh yeah, who says?"--and hardly knew where Arkansas was until I
followed my wife home from grad school at the University of Virginia.
Offer me NASCAR tickets or a root canal, and I'd opt for the dental
work. Does that disqualify me? Some Professional Southerners would say
so, but few Arkansans.

You accept Arkansas, Arkansas pretty much accepts you. Little
Rock's nothing like Richmond, or Charleston, S.C.. There's little talk
about the glories of the pre-Civil War South. "Arkansas aristocrat" is a
phrase that won't make. Indeed, "Thank God for Mississippi" is sometimes
said to be the state motto, as our neighbor to the east often makes
Arkansas look, well, so enlightened by contrast. You can infer
somebody's politics by whether or not they think it's funny.

Anyhow, I've been on the lookout for confederate flags over the
past week, but haven't actually seen any. Not even at the feed store or
the biker bar out on the old Conway highway. The old boy at the saddle
shop had some baseball caps with a rebel flag motif, but didn't appear
to have sold many. They looked out of place with the boots and bridles
and cowboy hats. Wearing one would pretty much be the equivalent of
going around with your middle finger stuck in the air.

People who act like that don't vote anyway. Even if they did,
Howard Dean could win the support of every rebel flag-waving redneck in
Arkansas and still lose badly--which I'm persuaded he'd do if he got the
Democratic nomination, losing the presidential election in the process.

But enough about one small Southern state, albeit one whose
electoral votes could easily turn the 2004 election. My larger point is
that the South is a big, complicated place. Racial melodrama simply
doesn't dominate public debate throughout the region anymore, as Sen.
John Edwards (D-N.C.) did his opportunistic best to point out during the
recent Democratic debate.

"The people that I grew up with, the vast majority of them, they
don't drive around with Confederate flags on pickup trucks," he said.
"The last thing we need in the South," he told Dean "is somebody like
you coming down and telling us what we need to do."

Bringing a potentially divisive symbol like the rebel flag into it
wasn't the smartest thing Dean's done in an otherwise cleverly
innovative campaign. But his rivals' make-believe outrage made them look
ridiculous. Does anybody really think that Al Sharpton and Sen. John
Kerry were personally offended?

What hurts Democrats most in such charades is the absurd ritual of
forcing somebody like Dean to apologize for a remark everybody knows
wasn't offensive in the first place. It feeds the perception that
they're fakers and panderers to trumped-up, phony grievances every
one--a party dominated by sissies and snobs.

And that's an image that Republicans have become unpleasantly
clever at manipulating. See, it's not race that sets the South apart
these days as much as religion: specifically a suburbanized brand of
Protestant fundamentalism that comforts people uneasy with rapid social
and technological change, by offering rigid moral certitude and positing
modernity and cosmopolitanism as the enemy.

If White House political guru Karl Rove gets his way, from
Arlington, Virginia to El Paso, Texas, the 2004 election will turn not
on Iraq or the dubious glories of the Bush economy but on liberal
judges, partial-birth abortion, and gay marriage.

Given President Bush's manifest failures, Arkansas's not the only
Southern-accented state that the right Democratic nominee could win in
2004. But Dean's vulnerability on the cultural/religious issues, I fear,
could doom his candidacy across the region.