Stop coddling the spoiled brat of presidential politics.

"There goes the South for a generation," Lyndon Johnson is said to have predicted as he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. Actually, it's been two generations, but otherwise Johnson was dead-on. For 40 years, the Democratic Party begged Southern Democrats to return to the fold. Always undignified, this pleading eventually became futile as well, like Shirley Booth calling for her dead puppy in Come Back, Little Sheba. Now John Kerry, winner of the New Hampshire primary, is taking some heat for saying so. But it's about time somebody did.

"Everybody always makes the mistake of looking south," the Massachusetts Democrat said in a Jan. 24 appearance at Dartmouth. And so they have. For two decades, it's been axiomatic that Democratic presidential candidates couldn't win unless they were Southerners. It worked once for Jimmy Carter and twice for Bill Clinton; Walter Mondale's and Mike Dukakis' defeats reinforced the logic. But it didn't work in 2000 for Al Gore—or rather, it didn't work well enough to counterbalance the Supreme Court's decision to hand over Florida's electors to George W. Bush. Gore lost every Southern state, including his home state of Tennessee. Thus Lesson 1: Southerners won't vote for you just because you're a Good Ole Boy. But Gore still came within four electoral votes of winning. If he'd taken Florida, which in many ways is not really a southern state, he'd be president. (Some people still argue that he did.) Thus Lesson 2: Democrats don't really need those southern votes.

Since 2000, many Democrats have questioned quietly why they should expend so much effort trying to win votes in what is now a solidly Republican region. The Democrats' ceaseless courtship of Southern votes has fostered an unhealthy sense of entitlement. Southerners now consider it their God-given right to supply Democrats with presidential candidates or, failing that, to force non-Southern candidates to discuss Him using an alien evangelical vocabulary. (God doesn't hear the prayers of Episcopalians, Congregationalists, or Presbyterians. No use even discussing Unitarians, Jews, and atheists.) Overindulgence has also made the South grotesquely hypersensitive to what non-Southern liberals say about it; to quote a famous witticism about the writer John O'Hara, today's South is "master of the fancied slight." Thus when Vermonter Howard Dean made the perfectly innocent remark that he'd like to win votes from "guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks"—a comment, incidentally, that indicated he did not intend to write off the South—he had to fall all over himself apologizing to Southerners offended by the shorthand. Never mind that subgroups in other parts of the country are routinely referred to in political discourse as "Joe Six-pack," "wealthy Jews," "blue-collar Midwesterners," "metrosexuals," inhabitants of "McMansions," "buppies," the "underclass," and so on without causing noticeable offense.

The taboo extends to discussing whether the South has enough votes to justify Democratic solicitude. Kerry's remarks prompted Dick Harpootlian, former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, to tell ABC's Jake Tapper, "I'm shocked he would be talking about a strategy of avoiding the South." Tapper also quoted Kerry rival John Edwards, political scientist Merle Black, and Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., emphasizing the importance of the South to the Democrats. But they're all Southerners; of course they think Democrats shouldn't write off their region. (Miller, who's starting to sound like a right-fringe crackpot, has the gall to tell Democrats what to do even though he's already endorsed President Bush.) Pressed by Mary Lynn F. Jones of the American Prospect, Black's brother and fellow political scientist Earl Black conceded that the Democrats' loss of the South didn't have to deprive them of the presidency. Republicans don't pretend they're trying to win approval from voters in the Northeast; why must Democrats keep mum about their diminishing returns in the South?

In a very persuasive recent essay for the Washington Post's "Outlook" section, Thomas Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, argues,

Trying to recapture the South is a futile, counterproductive exercise for Democrats because the South is no longer the swing region. It has swung: Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy" of 1968 has reached full fruition.

The centrist Democratic Leadership Council counters that writing off the South is a "bad idea." Democrats, it says, need

a national ticket that's determined to advance a tough, positive message on national security; that convinces middle-class voters that Democrats have a vision and a plan for restoring the broad-based economic and social progress, along with the fiscal responsibility, of the Clinton years; and that addresses the cultural concerns about Democrats that conservatives have spent so much time and money instilling and exploiting.

This is another way of saying that the Democratic Party needs swing voters. That's true; Clinton's "New Democrat" strategy of chasing swing voters remains a wise one. But Schaller punctures the myth that the South is a good place to seek them:

[T]he South has the fewest independent-minded voters available for Democratic conversion. Protest candidates John McCain, Ralph Nader and Perot all bombed there. Of the 10 states where Perot fared worst in 1992, all were Southern. … The South is where insurgents and independents go to die.