So a good friend sent me a post from The Economist about an interesting (non)controversy in the upcoming Obama presidency.  Apparently, there has been some murmuring that Obama is neglecting Southerners in his cabinet appointments.  This (supposedly) is surprising, giving a several-decades-long trend for Southerners to be disproportionately represented in Presidential and Congressional politics.

Capitol Building

Now, in terms of staking a claim on this debate, I completely agree with the short piece from The Economist.  People are neglecting a lot of Obama appointments that are clearly southerners.  So really, from the perspective of the substantive debate raised (i.e. “Is Obama neglecting southerners?”), I think the answer is simple: he isn’t neglecting southerners.  However, what this “debate” does raise are a couple of other interesting questions:

1) Why are some people so quick to discuss the decline of the South in politics?

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I’ve been doing some recreational reading here while visiting family in Florida (by the way – Lord I had forgotten how much happiness the Sun brings me).  Right now I’ve been reading The American South in the Twentieth Century and I came across a passage worth sharing.  I’m not sure how much I would agree with the rest of John Shelton Reed’s work (this is just a short anthology piece); but I think this passage sums up the spirit of what we’ve found at the Guide:

To allow that southern culture has changed, is changing, does not mean that it is disappearing as a variant on the American norm (whatever that might be).  It is difficult to summarize the facts of southern cultural difference, however, because nearly every logical possibility of what could be happening is happening.

For example, most of the recent economic and demographic change in the South has been a matter of the South’s converging on nonsouthern patterns (and the same could be said, in general, about changes in race relations), so those “southern” characteristics that were, in fact, the characteristics of poor, rural, poorly educated folks are plainly on the wane.  But other longstanding cultural differences are hanging in there.  For instance, attitudes toward the role of women have been changing everywhere, but the South remains relatively conservative on this score.

Some regional differences are getting larger: the South is more Baptist now than it was a century ago, for instance; regional differences in churchgoing are larger than they used to be; southerners are now more economically conservative than they were a generation ago.  And they’re more likely to say “fixing to” and “might could.”

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In an earlier post, Brian aptly mentioned that strange situation we three panhandlers share: we’re “kind-of” from the South. Of course, this isn’t true from a literal, geographic standpoint – we’re all definitely from the southern portion of our country. I never in my childhood lived north of the Florida panhandle. Until I recently moved to Michigan, the “dead of winter” was signaled by 45° weather. Still, culturally each of us panhandlers exist in that liminal space where we aren’t quite Southern enough for Southerners; but too Southern for the rest of the country to be anything but.

Let me give you an example. I was talking to my grandmother on my cell phone awhile back, and the connection was bad. I said to her “I’m having trouble hearing you,” and she said to me: “that’s because you talk like a Yankee.” Ouch. Don’t sugarcoat it Granny.

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