Reply #99: bluntly,

[incontrovertible]

It's not so much the "best candidates" that we decline to nominate, it's the policies endorsed and enacted by the "best candidates" the North tends to generate.

You, the urban north, have subway systems and we don't. We can't afford a $5/gallon tax on gasoline, or any other BTU tax, no matter how little you in the northern magalopolises have to drive a car.

You the urban north, most likely have a police response time of a few minutes. Huge percentages of southerners have police response times of a half-hour minimum. We need firearms - yes, even handguns - to protect against intruders. You, the urban north, could not possibly give less of a shit about that.

You, the urban north, see pretty much no legitimate reason that anybody in the United States might have to own a SUV, and would basically be happy to outlaw them entirely tomorrow.

You, the urban north, don't have one-fiftieth of the illegal immigration problems we have in the border states, and yet you see any attempt to patrol the border or check the citizenship of applicants for state-funded welfare programs as racist and bigoted, and think we, the border-states, should just shut up and suck it. Gray Davis is getting recalled due to a budget that was essentially destroyed for just this reason, and yet has any northern politician proposed that the tax burden of the whole United States be adjusted so as to deal with this national, multi-state problem? Hint: chirp.

Having lived here, in Texas, my entire life, and spent a substantial amount of time in the Northeast, and in discussion with people native to the urban north, I'm basically of the opinion that the majority of urban northerners would greatly prefer it if, following the civil war, the Southern states had been stripped entirely of their suffrage, and been relegated to a perpetual taxation-without-representation.

Bottom line, it seems to me, and to most southerners, that most urban northerners, regardless of party or affiliation, believe they know better how to run the lives of, and control the property of, the entirity of the South.

Would the South vote for a northerner? Absolutely. The South would even vote for a black northerner, believe it or not. The sole requirement would be that the northerner in question flagrantly and repeatedly repudiate the whole presumption of superiority so prevalent throughout the urban north.

Frankly, I've been in most towns with a population of a million or more north of Virginia. For any urban northerner to tell me that, say, Baltimore, or, say, New Haven, are in any way objectively superior to, say, Austin, or Atlanta, or Biloxi for that matter, is an insult to my intellect, as well as to my home. I don't hear much about people beating down the doors to get into Cleveland, but whenever I go down to San Antonio, I lose count of the yanqui tourists after about the first half-million.

Finally, I reject presumptively any objection regarding my "defensiveness." It isn't defensiveness to say "look who's talking" after being called fat and ugly by the fattest, ugliest person in the room.