Howard Dean had a clue

Dean said "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," the former Vermont governor was quoted as saying in Saturday's Des Moines Register. "We can't beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats."

Finally someone used the Confederate flag as a symbol of what it represents better than anything else - poor Southern whites.

Who provided most of the manpower for the South? Poor southern whites. Whose bodies covered the battlefields? Poor southern whites. It's little wonder that they found the Confederate flag a symbol of pride and solidarity.

Now let some years pass. What group was the most threatened *economically* by civil rights? Poor southern whites. A group that was already struggling to get by suddenly had a whole new class of people to compete with them for jobs, often at lower rates.

What followed was only to be expected. Just as labor interests in South Africa pushed for and got apartheid, poor southern whites voted for the Democrats and their Jim Crow policies. Just as we see today with union violence (hmm - more Democrat supporters), we saw intimidation of new labor sources. It's not just, but history shows it's 100% human.

It sounds like poor southern whites are a natural Dem constituency. But race hustlers can't permit that. So poor southern whites are the only group left that you can insult with impunity, despite their very well known poverty and other social problems. They can't even keep their symbol, the Confederate flag.

(and before some jackass says that hoods and burning crosses were their symbols too, I recommend a look at US history, which will show that the KKK was nationwide and politically potent in large numbers as late as the 1920's. The Yankees, lacking blacks in most places, mostly chose to pick on Catholics, Jews and recent immigrants instead.)

His opponents immediately chose the low road, with even nominally sane Lieberman getting his licks in. Kerry informed us that he'd rather be the candidate of the NAACP than the NRA, showing that's he's definitely the candidate of the non-sequitur (how does he think blacks defended themselves against the KKK, or Schindler's Jews defended themselves against the Nazis?).

Even though he said something defensible and did bug some of the right people, Dean couldn't keep it up for long:

In response to the criticism, Dean released a statement saying: "I want people with Confederate flags on their trucks to put down those flags and vote Democratic - because the need for quality health care, jobs and a good education knows no racial boundaries.

I guess a guy whose supporters supposedly are lily-white has to run from this undeservedly demonized symbol. But I hope his supporters remember that when he had a chance to show some stones and stand for something, he ran.