SOUTH BRONX, THE SOUTH SOUTH BRONX.

KRS-One would be so proud of Colin Powell:

Gov. Palin, to some extent, pushed the party more to the right, and I think she had something of a polarizing effect when she talked about how small town values are good. Well, most of us don’t live in small towns. And I was raised in the South Bronx, and there’s nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx.

And when they came to Virginia and said the southern part of Virginia is good and the northern part of Virginia is bad. The only problem with that is there are more votes in the northern part of Virginia than there are in the southern part of Virginia, so that doesn’t work.

Actually, what they said was that Northern Virginia wasn't "Real Virginia" and that "Real Virginia" was "southern in nature." Republicans explicitly deny that their whole "small-town values" shtick has racial undertones, but that's really hard to square with the notion that Virginia would go red during the election because "Real Americans" who are "southern in nature" don't like black people or any of that race-mixing stuff.

At any rate, when Powell says things like this, reminiscent of "we worship an awesome G-d in the blue states" you start to get the impression of what it really meant to people to have someone defining political identity in terms of inclusion rather than cultural rivalry, but also of how people are beginning to internalize the diminishing returns of certain aspects of the culture war.

--A. Serwer