TailOverTeaKettle.com

So New Hampshire has spoken. John Kerry is 2 for 2 and rolling along on his way to the nomination. (Again I will remind you of the names Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart, Edmund Muskie, Tom Harkin, and Richard Gephardt… but so much for the New Hampshire and Iowa handicapping.) But Kerry is now officially the ‘front-runner’. He better get ready for the assult. Once the honeymoon is over (and it usually doesn’t take long), he will become the lightning rod.

Interestingly, Kerry apparently is not that interested in campaigning in the South, apparently feeling that it should be either given over to the Republicans or perhaps that it’s not worthy of his attention (Forget the South? Frontrunner Kerry Downplays Importance of Region Many Democrats See as Crucial). Believe me, I am a just a transplanted Yankee here, but I think this is a big mistake. Not necessarily for his quest for nomination, but as a long-term election strategy. According to the story:

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., is discounting notions that any Democratic
candidate would have to appeal to Southern voters in order to win the presidency, calling such thinking a "mistake" during a speech at Dartmouth College.

Kerry’s remarks Saturday were so starkly antithetical to how many southern Democrats feel their party should campaign for the presidency, that a former South Carolina state Democratic chairman told ABCNEWS that Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C., who endorsed Kerry last week, perhaps "ought to reconsider his endorsement."

During a town hall meeting on the Dartmouth campus, Kerry noted that former Vice President Al Gore would be president if he’d won any number of other non-Southern states in 2000, including New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Ohio.

"Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South," Kerry said, in response to a question about winning the region. "Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own."

Perhaps John doesn’t realize it, but if Al Gore had managed to win a single Southern state he would have actually been President right now, instead of sitting home (probably not in his home state of Tennessee) crying about the Electoral College and recounting Florida’s hanging chads in his dreams. And don’t forget that the last three Democratic Presidents were all from the South.

I don’t know that I appreciated Zell Miller properly when he was Governor of Georgia. I know I was mad when then Governor Roy Barnes appointed Zell to fill the term of Republican Paul Coverdell when died in office. When Zell promised to actually vote his conscience and try to follow the wishes of those he represented, he really kept his word. It certainly would have been easier to allow the trappings of office overtake that. Of course, now he is disowned from the Democratic Party and gains little praise from the Democratic establishment, such as Jimmy Carter (Carter: Miller’s Senate appointment was ‘mistake’ ).

In his book, A National Party No More Zell outlines how the Democratic Party has slid to the left through the years and lost touch with the South. If you haven’t read it, you should. So should Kerry (if he doesn’t want to buy it, he should just read the excerpts here and here.

Once upon a time, the most successful Democratic leader of them all, FDR, looked south and said, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." Today our national Democratic leaders look south and say, "I see one-third of a nation and it can go to hell."

Give ‘em hell, Zell.