Interesting commentary over at Race 4 2008:

Since I started blogging at Redstate three years ago and since my conservative epiphany in 2000 I can say that the biggest disappointment I have had with some conservatives in the blogosphere is the amount of anti-southern bigotry I have seen. I have even come to have a superiority complex on all things regional given that I have never known a Southerner that would not vote for someone because they were not from the South. I guess we developed this superiority during the formative Civil Rights years!

Or maybe we base our votes on relevant information? Like their policies, duh? Character?

Folks, voters vote on issues, character and leadership. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are all from the South. Bush kills terrorists. The other guys that talk slow appeased them. Bush cut taxes. The others from Dixie raised them. Bush picks good judges.
Clinton put a feminist on the court. Carter lusted in his heart.
Clinton lusted all over the carpet and Bush is faithful to his wife.

Southern Diversity. (Except on immigration, all three would sell out the country)

Voters will not be “reminded” of Bush if Thompson advocates border security first, cuts in government spending and delivers lines like a fine actor from Law and Order.

Where a candidate is from is irrelevant at the top of the ticket.If it is relevant to you, look in the mirror.

I think the post would have been better titled, "anti-southern bias...", which I think would be more accurate.

What struck me as a read it was that Carter, Clinton and Bush actually benefited from their southern roots. Carter neatly avoided the busing issue that polarized politics in the 1970s by supporting it but being southern. As Pat Caddell put it, southerners just couldn't bring themselves to believe that a southern man really meant it when he said he supported busing.

Clinton, even more than Carter, benefited from the perception of southern cultural expectations, allowing him to talk liberal when it suited him, but ride the perception that he was essentially a conservative Democrat.

The Democrats, in what was about as explicit an acknowledgment of the built-in southern political bias, worked hard to disqualify George W. Bush as a southerner, just as they did with his father. The problem was that Dubya looks, walks and talks authentic southern so thoroughly that it was never a credible argument.

I think what began with Carter has culminated with Bush--the public has been disabused of the myth of southern cultural uniformity. We ain't buyin' the implication that Fred Thompson's southern (read: former slave-holding state) actually means anything beyond a dialect and a taste for fried food.

Conservative no longer has an accent. Neither does liberal.

I suspect that what is really going on, because I take the view myself, is that conservatives are looking for a more articulate marketing of conservative policies by a Republican administration.

Its not the southern, its the stupid that is bothering us.