Even as losers, northeastern Democrats managed to come through as feeling superior to the red-state louts who, for some inexplicable reason, kept kicking their butts at the ballot box. It’s foolish to think they will be any more humble as winners, of course, as New York Congressman Charles Rangel demonstrated last week. It’s fair enough for Rangel to vow to correct what he sees as an imbalance between the amount of federal taxes collected in New York and the amount of federal revenue disbursed. Exactly why was it necessary, however, for Rangel to add that “Mississippi gets more than their (sic) fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?” Nice work, Charlie. Southern Republicans are really indebted to you for some additional incendiary ammo to fire at their Democratic opponents in 2008.
Further evidence, if we needed any, that bias against white southerners remains an entirely respectable prejudice comes from, of all places, Nevada, where in explaining why Democratic State Senator Dina Titus failed in her bid for the governorship, pundits uniformly cite her pronounced southern accent as a decided negative. Noting widespread complaint about Titus’s accent, one commentator concluded: “Her unfavorables were high not because of tax votes or her support for "programs," but because people didn't like how she sounded….” To be sure, it didn’t help much that how Titus ‘”sounded” to many folks was brash and loud rather than soft and syrupy like a true “southern belle,” Still it is truly revealing to find the Nevada blogosphere rife with blatantly negative comments about the southernness not only of Titus, but of her fellow Georgia native, Jack Carter, the son of ol’ “Jimmy Who?” who ran, rather quixotically, it seems, for one of state’s seats in the U. S. Senate. Complaining about Carter’s “yokel accent,” one blogger suggested, “Jack Carter and Dina Titus have to be pals because I know when they are talking together they don’t perceive the chalkboard scratching accents that they both have.”
If such comments seem all too familiar to southern whites, there is a new twist here. Carter was also condemned as a liberal “carpetbagger,” and he and Titus were characterized as “liberal birds of a feather.” Southern accents have been inaccurately and unfairly associated with many things, but liberalism? Do they really expect us to stand for that?
