Katha Pollitt writes about Howard Dean using the bad words "confederate flag" and lays a little smack down on the Dems and gets in a poke at the media as well. Pullquotes:

People say they want politicians to get real, but just let one try to say something not totally blow-dried and focus-grouped, and everyone piles on-- especially if, like Dean, he's the front-runner. Thus, white Southern politicians like John Edwards and Zell Miller attacked Dean for stereotyping white Southerners as racists when we all know nobody flies the Confederate flag anymore, or if they do it's merely a symbol of "heritage," while Al Sharpton accused him of failing to understand that people who flaunt the flag are, in fact, racists.

[...]Here is Dean, mocked by the media as a one-note antiwarrior, champion of Vermont boutique cheesemakers and Internet insomniacs, actually trying, maybe a little clumsily, to do what pundits always tell the Dems to do--put down that brie, pick up a hunting rifle and talk to the white working class about jobs, schools, healthcare.

[...]As Gore was typed as boring and deceptive, Dean will be portrayed as arrogant and hasty. Bush's verbal atrocities will be downplayed; Dean's "insensitive" remarks will make headlines. The South will be America; New England will be France; New York City will be hell. Nobody will acknowledge this--what, you think there's a conspiracy? You think we all meet together in a room and decide?--until someone does a study of campaign coverage two years after Bush is re-elected and proves it.

I especially liked this aside:

We'll leave for another time the question of why there is no such thing as a tin ear for the North.

Sing it, sister Katha. (Note that her recent book is in our sidebar and has been for quite some time. Highly recommended.)