Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company

Clearly, claims that evangelicals have hijacked the nation's politics are greatly exaggerated. In fact, polling data show that President Bush's real base is not religious but economic. . . .

And neither region nor religion can override the class divide: if recent patterns hold, a majority (about 52 percent) of poor Southern white evangelicals will vote for Mr. Kerry in November, while only 12 percent of affluent Southern white evangelicals will.

Once again, it's the economy, stupid. Some liberal elites who go beyond secular to anti-religious have done the Democratic Party a disservice. The South is no more an inherently racist region prone to Jebus nuttery than the Palestinians are a people inherently prone to terrorism.

It's like there's this attitude that the South is a lost cause and that the Democratic Party is now the party of anti-Southerners. Talk to a liberal and one thing they might make fun of is the number of country music acts that showed up at the Republican National Convention. And they hypocritically still make fun of George W. Bush's ludicrous claim to be a "uniter, not a divider."

A truly progressive political ideology must abandon any hint of belief that nothing good can come of the South or that nothing good can come of evangelical Christianity.

(5:01 PM)