Grim's Suggestion

Here, Grim (a Southern Democrat) speaks to John Kerry in 2004. It's just as applicable today.

Return to the fold? Sir, Southern Democrats still stand right where the fold used to be. It is the fold that has moved away from us. You have, to extend the metaphor, sought other grazing in pastures you thought from afar would prove greener: socialism, identity politics, abortion politics, judicial activism and its illiberal accomplice, the litigation of every aspect of American life. You have turned free and equal citizens into a hierarchy: lawyers, and subjects of the law. That would bad enough, but you have also encouraged the lawyers who become judges to be legislators, rewriting the law at pleasure. Return to you? You tred ground that shows no sign of any previous human foot: nor will it show yours for long, for it is a morass.

...we have never asked anyone to talk about God who didn't want to do so. In fact, speaking for myself, I'd rather you didn't. There is little mroe irritating than listening to an irreligious Yankee suddenly start prattling on about Jesus when he starts campaigning in the South (Howard Dean, call your office). Southerners do like religious men--Jews or otherwise--but they like forthright men more.

After noting that Kerry had essentially written off the South, Grim makes a sagacious observation which just happens to fit the Midwest, too:

What does this spell for the future of the Democratic party? Illegitimacy, for one thing. A party that tries to govern America, having little support except on the coasts, will find that even if it wins the occasional election its policies are very hard to enact or to execute.

It is likely to find, over time, that trying to compete with a party that has a national strategy when it has only a regional strategy will cause it to be increasingly marginalized.

Let us hope that the Republicans are jotting notes furiously...