More on Dean and That Flag

I'll post some additional comments later. But I'm providing a couple of links on the Dean flag issue. This is from Emory Walker at Daily Kos. This part I like:

The notion that confederate flag-bearing, gun-toting truck drivers make up the better part of that [Southern white working-class] population is nonsense--the kind only a carpetbagging yankee could conjure. That is why that phraseology will ultimately come back to haunt Dr. Dean. There is a New South, and it looks nothing like cotton plantations and tent revivals.

This part is off the mark:

I argue here that the chief causus belli [in the Civil War] was not slaveholding per se but rather the question of the right to secede. Only the leadership of Abraham Lincoln finally brought an end to this vital historical debate. It is worth noting that Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves as his first act; instead, that was nearly his last act in the Civil War. Ken Burns described it as an effort to "ennoble" an unpopular war. At that moment, citizens of northern cities were busy
lynching black freemen and rioting against the draft. ...

In that sense, I am with Gov. Dean, who at one point argued that the confederate flag was a states' rights issue. Those in the old Union states who would offer their opinions on this: Thank y'all, but we'll settle this on our own schedule.

This from Hesiod is also good (scroll down to "BLOCK THE VOTE"):

[Dean's flag remark] may not hurt him much in the early primary states, but it will kill him in the South.

The "confederate" voters will avoid him in droves, and he will turn off black voters. All the
voters heard was his original statement. Very few of them heard his detailed
explanations, or the context.