Southern democrats need to be acting as organizers and activists, not as Madison Avenue ad men.
The only way we're going to start cutting into the GOP's majority in places like Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, or even Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, is on a county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct basis.
I am sick to death of strategies among Democrats which either ignore the south (the "Whistling Past Dixie" approach) or put forward the notion that Democrats should run as "Republican Lite" (the Democratic Leadership Council approach).
We are losing because we are lazy, both intellectually and in the field.
I've spent time thinking about some of the counties in Georgia which went overwhelmingly for Romney. Walker County in nortwest Georgia is a good example. The county went roughly 75% for Romney. It's a 95% white county with a 13% poverty rate.
We should be fighting tooth and nail for counties like Walker. Everyone in the county should know what the Democratic Party stands for, not how the party is defined by the Right Wing Noise Machine.
Every active Democrat should know the politics in their own precinct, and in their own county, and be able to respond as progressives to local issues.
This isn't an abstract or settled issue. Many progressives think the south is just some uniformly retrograde area which should be ignored except as an object of ridicule. Many others think we should be doing nothing but fielding Blue Dogs to get the House of Representatives to the magic number. Both approaches are seriously screwed up.