The South Shall Lose Again

Today, Left In Alabama notes an incredible miscalculation by the GOP. For not only have the Republicans lost America, they are losing the south.

Admitted that voting patterns seem to show a different story (white southerners turned out in droves to vote against Barack Obama), the GOP began losing the South in November. Paraphrasing Bob Kincaid over at Head-On-Radio a few months ago, the first domino fell in South Carolina. In losing one southern state, the Republican Party can no longer count on a ‘solid South.’

Knocked to their partisan knees, the Grand Old Party has doubled down on obstructionism. They have met Obama’s attempts at bipartisanship with venom. Striking at Obama early was supposed to reveal his ‘weakness’ and set the stage for their comeback.

They are doing this because God tells them to, because they are afraid of the world, and because they’re shameless.

What they don’t understand is they are dealing with a whole new kind of president:

Here’s what Redeye had to say at Left In Alabama:

To be clear, this is what Sessions and Shelby in the Senate and Griffith, Bright, Aderholt, Bacchus and the entire Bama House delegation (sans Davis) voted against on behalf of the Alabama citizens;

Impact on Alabama

• Creating or saving 55,000 jobs over the next two years.
• Providing a making work pay tax cut of up to $1,000 for 1,770,000 workers and their families
• Making 70,000 families eligible for a new American Opportunity Tax Credit to make college affordable.
• Offering an addition $100 per month in unemployment insurance benefits to 247,000 workers in Alabama who have lost their jobs this recession.
• Providing funding to modernize at least 156 schools in Alabama so our children have the labs, classrooms and libraries they need to compete in the 21st century economy.

Shelby and Sessions haven’t been paying attention to their own state’s governor. They also haven’t been keeping up with hometown news: Alabama is about $1.3 billion dollars short on its education budget right now. This is going to hit Republican voters harder than anyone. In the rural Black Belt (named for its soil), somewhere this fall an Alabama town will not see its home squad play a football game, and that will be the beginning of the end.

Alabama is in a hole deeper than the numbers show. We are a state utterly dependent on federal money. We refuse to change our state constitution and pay taxes. In short, the only way for Alabama to make ends meet is for our Republican governor to travel to Washington and beg for relief next year.

And here’s the dirty little secret behind the ‘solid South’: all these fomer Confederate states are in exactly the same boat.

In a purely partisan move, Senators Shelby and Sessions voted to bankrupt Alabama government. Unless state relief is reintroduced in the House-Senate negotiations, the Senators have guaranteed a very big (and very public) foot in the mouth of the Republican Party — one that will be repeatedly inserted by other Republican governors.

The South shall lose again. And in the process, the Republicans stand to lose the South.

h/t Mooncat: