Matthew Stinson links to a Jonathan Chait TNR piece that takes Howard Dean to task for his vague Southern strategy. As Chait points out, it’s Southern Politics 101 all over again:

So Dean’s plan is to get poor Southern whites to vote their economic interests rather than their cultural predilections. How simple! Why hasn’t somebody else thought of that idea? Oh wait, that’s right: Everybody has thought of that idea.

The notion that the Southern economic elite try to divide the populace along racial rather than economic lines goes back around 400 years. Even though most southern whites didn’t own slaves, a majority of them supported the institution. ...

As it turns out, forging that economic coalition is a good deal more difficult than it sounds. The only success liberals have enjoyed has come when they’ve found candidates like Bill Clinton, who distanced himself from cultural liberalism (on issues like crime and welfare, for instance) to convince Southern whites that he was more conservative than the national Democratic Party.

Actually, before the 1960s maybe-realignment, southern Democrats regularly ran on economic issues—and won. The most infamous example is Huey Long, but national Democrats running for the presidency were winning electoral college votes across the South into the 1960s. What’s changed?

1. Since the Great Society programs of LBJ, and their consolidation under Nixon, there’s a sufficient national “safety net” that Republicans are not going to dismantle—no matter what rhetoric you hear from the far left. This has diminished the economic interest of poor whites in supporting Democratic candidates.
2. The national Democratic party has moved away from the conservative values shared by southern whites, most infamously in its blanket support for Roe v. Wade. This makes Republicans relatively more appealing.

Can national Democrats recapture the South? Unless they can neutralize Republicans’ natural advantage on “race, guns, God and gays,” or can come up with an economic program that is overwhelmingly appealing to both poor whites and blacks (perhaps like Dean’s idea of “affirmitive action” on the basis of economic status, rather than race), that seems exceedingly unlikely.