The Dirty Little Secret of the Alabama and Mississippi Primaries
Here’s a simple fact that has been lost amid Mitt Romney’s newfound love of grits, Newt Gingrich’s desire for gun racks on Chevy Volts and Rick Santorum’s insistence that the South is a home game for him: None of the top three Republican presidential contenders are “of” the South in any meaningful way.
“The south is not just a place, it is, as they proudly tell you, a state of mind,” said Republican consultant Alex Castellanos. “The North is defined by reason, the South embraces romance and the heart. The North is relativist, the South lives by absolutes. When the South is right, it is absolutely right. When wrong, it is absolutely, tragically wrong.”
Ed Rogers, a Republican consultant and Alabama native, put it more bluntly. “None of them hit the sweet spot,” he said of the GOP field. “None of the candidates are story tellers, none take football seriously, none are Protestant and nobody really has a favorite country music singer.”
What Castellanos and Rogers are both getting at is this: Not only do the top three candidates lack true geographic ties (in two of the three cases) to the region but, more importantly, they are culturally and attitudinally in a very different place than most Southerners.