The Political South: My How We’re Changing!

Tom Baxter of Southern Political Report post-morts the post-election southern landscape today. Most  interesting analysis:

Adding further complexity to the picture is the ribbon of blue counties which begin in Charleston, S.C., and thread through the heart of last week’s red states all the way to Chickasaw County, Miss. These counties, which encompass most of the Black Belt, gave Obama some of his biggest majorities anywhere: He garnered 87 percent, the highest county total I could find for either candidate, in Macon County, Ala., and Jefferson County, Miss. They’ve voted solidly Democratic in the past, but never simultaneously with Democratic majorities the size of those in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Charlotte and other big cities across the South.

All this suggests a South with some familiar landmarks, but also one primed to change very dramatically over the coming decade. It’s easy to imagine, given the herculean challenges facing him, Obama losing the states he won last week in 2012. Given the age of McCain’s core supporters, it’s not inconceivable either that Obama could win states he lost this year.

But the South has shown that in one of the cricitical elections of our history, it was not all of one mind. And it’s unlikely ever to be again.

Full SPR article here. Heck, give a Cracker a laptop, some free broadband out in the scrub pines, and Lordy knows what might happen! From Bloomberg.com:

Obama has also made broader Internet access a goal and insisted that broadcasters focus more on public service. In a statement to the FCC last year, he called for `new rules promoting greater coverage of local issues and greater responsiveness of broadcasters to the communities they operate in.’

The above article in-full here.

The Smallest Detail Will Tell Your Story

After consuming ludicrously large, possibly unhealthy, amounts of post-Democratic National Convention-Obama-acceptance-speech spin, lipflap, analysis, blog posts, whipping posts, live streams, generic coverage, video, columns, old media, new media, medium media, HDTV, jerks and twitches, post-morts, Twits, Tweets, Monday morning quarterbacking, bickering and rapturizing from every possible media source on the planet except maybe Al Jazeera, I finally tossed-in the towel and looked homeward, Spacey. Where I found Tom Baxter, writing for Southern Political Report, with your moment-in-time from last night’s stadium stands over Denver:

After every national convention I’ve ever been to (16, if you count one Libertarian convention in Atlanta and Ross Perot’s 2000 convention in Long Beach) the streets outside the hall have been littered with discarded signs and placards. Here there were practically none. The Democrats left clutching whatever souvenirs they had, as if they wanted to hold to the memory of this night forever.

Full article here.

New Media Tells Old Media What’s Journalism Now

From Southern Political Report’s Tom Baxter:

Convinced (former Alabama Governor) Siegelman was guilty and ready to move on, they (traditional media) were bailing out of the story just as the new media was beginning to pay attention. Since Siegelman’s conviction, the story has been kept alive on the internet — notably on the blog Horton writes for Harper’s and several spirited, Democratic-leaning Alabama blogs — and in a few of the state’s smaller and alternative newspapers.

At times, the animosity between the two sides of the media divide has equaled that between the two parties in Alabama. Horton has sharply criticized the Birmingham News, the Mobile Press-Register and the Huntsville Times, all former Newhouse papers now owned by Advance Publications, for their coverage.

Bloggers… whatcha gonna do with ’em?. Read more from ’em! All that Alabama dirt Mr. Horton at Harper’s has been digging in is here.