No, this is where I disagree with everybody on this thread, and probably on this site.  He is emphatically NOT attacking it head-on.  He is speaking about it less euphemistically than it is usually spoken about, but its not head-on.  Talking about economic issues eclipsing racial issues doesn't take up the subject head-on at all, its a diversionary tactic to make it be about something else because it is far too difficult to do it the right way.  

While I applaud Dean's instincts to take up the issue, I blame him for doing it sloppily and half-heartedly.  He's doing it in a way that is comfortable for his non-Southern, non-poor, primarily white base.  That's not dealing with anything head-on.  The fallacy that Dean's approach has (and that many here share, it seems) is that racial issues and economic issues are AT ODDS with one another, rather than seeing the ways they work together.  Dean seems to be saying the racism would fade away if people just acted in their economic interests, without any attention to how the economic interests are still working in decidedly racialized ways.  

Issues about the South and race are far more complex than "the South is filled with resentful white racists".  It is, but the way their r esentful white racism works is on several levels at one time.  His attempt is not head-on at all, because it refuses to acknowledge and understand how this works.  Otherwise he'd have developed a different approach.

I don't agree with Julia that these folks are "hopeless".  I do agree that we waste time focusing on them.  I don't agree with Dean supporters that Dean is not pandering.  He is, but in ways no body wants to see, because it hits way too close to home. And I don't agree that he is cutting through BS.  I would grant you that his intentions are well placed, but I fear (and the reason it makes me so angry) is that with his not very thoughtful blundering and rather dangerous simplifications he will take the discussion down a path that makes it even harder than it is now to have the kind of difficult but necessary, "head-on" discussions we really need to have.  

The only public person I've ever heard in the mainstream of US politics who has taken a head-on attack to this issue is Lani Guinier. It just doesn't happen very much, and perhaps Howard Dean is the person to begin the process, but if so, he'd better get a much more sophisticated understanding of what he is talking about in order to facilitate and negotiate the varying threads and the contradictory interests at play.