But I'll be gall-durned if I can remember the last time I saw a Confederate flag - on a truck or off it, as we say in the sticks. Rednecks, short for Dean's "White folks in the South who drive pickups with Confederate flag decals," are not indigenous to the South, as any visitor to rural Vermont or Massachusetts knows.
We've still got a few Confederate reminders around, and you can find a flag if you hunt for one. But the South is so inundated with out-of-state license plates and accents, it seems weirdly out of tune to discuss the region's demographics in terms of pickup trucks and battle flags.
The whole episode smacks of classism if not racism: Northern Nobility embraces Southern Idiocracy. How long before one of them says: "Why some of my best friends are Southerners"?
I don't have much use for the Confederate flag and wrote three columns urging that the flag be removed from the South Carolina statehouse dome. It seemed inappropriate to fly such a divisive symbol over a public property.
But the Confederate flag is tricky among Southerners - a volatile issue, the nuances of which are often lost on Northerners and other visitors to the kudzu states. Not everyone with the battle flag in his home or on his truck is a dangerous racist, though some are. Plenty of sticker-free Trans-Am drivers in New York are, too, not that I have anything against Trans-Ams.
For many others - well-educated, prosperous, thoughtful Southerners, as opposed to the undereducated, uninsured, vacant-staring Walker Evans sharecroppers Dean apparently envisions - the Confederate flag is a symbol of Southern history, of battles fought and lost, of family members valiant and dead, of a person's right to express himself even if it offends others.
Gephardt, Dean, Lieberman and Kerry probably needn't waste too much time trying to court the Southern pickup crowd. Most I've seen - with American or Confederate flags on them - also have another sticker on their bumpers. It's red, white and blue and says: Bush.