Writing Off the South

This reinforces my continued misgivings about Kerry:

Presidential candidate John Kerry can�t resist painting a scenario showing how Democrats can win the White House without the South.
The U.S. senator from Massachusetts has done it on at least three occasions. Each time it landed him in political hot water.
You’d think he would have learned.
Last March at a California fund-raiser far from the ears of Southerners � he thought � Kerry spelled out how he could lose all 11 states of the Old Confederacy and still beat President Bush next year.
“Al Gore proved that you can get elected president of the United States without winning one Southern state � if he had simply won New Hampshire,” he said, referring to the former vice president’s near miss in 2000.
“Democrats have to stop looking at the small solution that the country is compartmentalized in that way.”
In a recent appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning, America,” he was asked about rival John Edwards’ claim that the U.S. senator from North Carolina is more electable with his base in the South.
Kerry disputed Edwards’ assertion and repeated the Gore example to prove his point.
“That�s not a real argument,” Kerry maintained.
If that weren’t enough, the senator told a New Hampshire audience yet again on Saturday that Democrats didn’t have to appeal to Southern voters in order to win the presidency. He called such thinking a “mistake.”
“Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South,” he said in response to a question about winning the region.

Bad strategy, senator.
Kerry is technically correct that a candidate can win the White House without any southern electoral votes. But if he thinks he can win without being competitive in culturally more conservative areas such as the South, he’s headed for a train wreck.