My Blogger News Network colleague Warner Todd Huston has some great comments on a recent Washington Post op-ed. He rightly points out the writer is South-o-phobic and bigoted, defining “Dixie” political attitudes as “knee-jerk militaristic, anti-scientific, dogmatically religious, and culturally, sexually and racially phobic.”

Even if Southerners are disproportionately those things, painting with a broad brush won’t win you any converts.

What I’d like to say, though, is that Meyerson is dead wrong in his analysis. He claims that the GOP lost non-Southern support because it embraced Southern policies.

His evidence seems pretty damning at first:

“The Democrats won control of five state legislatures, all outside the South, and took more than 300 state legislative seats away from Republicans, 93 percent of them outside the South.”

The thing is, though, that virtually every analyst has seen the election as an Iraq war referendum against conservatives. Where is such a backlash most likely to gain traction? In the places that are not very conservative. Even Lincoln Chafee lost, for crying out loud, and he might not even stay a Republican.

And what region is most conservative? Oh yeah, the South. So even if the population shifted left a bit, it wouldn’t be enough to get Republicans out of power there.

Republicans kept the South but lost elsewhere because the situation ousted moderate Republicans in moderate and liberal states, due to the Iraq war. The South does not contain moderate or liberal states, it contains conservative ones that won’t go Democrat when the wind changes directions. It’s not because the Republican Party pursued a “Southern” strategy.

On a side note, for an analysis of whether the Harold Ford ad was “racist,” see my American Spectator op-ed.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com and http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.