Then you understand it badly.  

Dean is not wrong because he is appealing to poor Southerners (and poor other regioners), his wrong in the way he is doing it, by pretending that race doesn't matter, when everyone who lives in that region knows that it does.  Of course race matters in this country.  He'd be better off speaking plainly about it. (That's how he managed to offend both Edwards and Sharpton at the  same time).  Edwards wasn't appealing to a "racist instinct" but to the "protection of home and Southern identity" instinct.  Now, those two are closely tied up with racism, no doubt, but if you reduce them to this parallel, then you miss how the whole racial coding works.  And if you want to break up the racial coding you need to first understand it.  The fact that your parallelize these things, shows how you, like Dean, are reducing the issue down to components that, while important, aren't enough to fix anything.  Continuing to make parallels where there is no symmetry will only obstruct the process.