LONDON: As an American who yields to none in her loathing of the incumbent president, I am frequently invited to enthuse over the presumptive 2008 Democratic contenders. But I’m unconvinced that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is electable. Perhaps it’s time to consider the dark horse.

US papers report that John Edwards has gone on the attack; one of his advisers just opined that a Clinton nomination would lose blue states. A recent poll agreed: more than half of Americans would never vote for Clinton, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who remembers the first Clinton presidency. Obama presents a similar problem. I’m a fan, and from his home state, but I don’t think he can win the presidency yet. Moreover, the dark horse has an overlooked advantage, and given that none of the nominees has offered anything so divisive as actual ideas to help us choose among them, Democratic strategists might consider Edwards for one reason alone: history.

The election of the first Republican president, in 1860, precipitated the US civil war. His name was Abraham Lincoln, and his new party represented the urban north, federalism, and abolition. The party of the rural south, the Democrats, supported agrarianism, states’ rights, and slavery. After Lincoln’s election, southern Democrats seceded from the union, formed the Confederate States of America, and declared war on Republicans.

The entire south — the 11 confederate states plus five border states — voted as a block for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election for the next 60 years. There were only two, quite extraordinary, exceptions: the election of 1872, in which the Democratic candidate actually died between the popular and the electoral vote — and six southern states still chose a dead man over a Republican; and the election of 1928, when a Roman Catholic, pro-immigration, pro-civil rights, anti-prohibition New Yorker proved too much for the south — although once again six intransigent holdouts still voted Democrat.

In 1948 everything changed. Harry S Truman, a southern Democrat, endorsed a strong civil rights platform. The deep south nearly seceded again, as four “Dixiecrat” states followed white supremacist Strom Thurmond. Truman won the rest of the south, but civil rights proved the deal-breaker. The Democrats had always represented the workers, and the Republicans big business (plus ca change). The rural southern working man had two traditional claims to power: gender and race. He may have been white trash, but by God he was superior to women and “negroes”. As the Democratic platform liberalised, the conservative south began turning Republican, and electoral maps of ensuing elections show the subsequent contest for the south in the 14 presidential elections since 1948.

The neglected fact is this: with one notable exception since the 1944 election of Franklin D Roosevelt, no Democratic president has come from a northern state.

Not for 60 years — the exact same amount of time that the solid south voted for Democrats.

If the Democrats want to win, they need to think hard about nominating someone from the south. It won’t guarantee them the election, but if they nominate another northerner I fear they can kiss the White House goodbye for another four years — and the rest of the world can weep into its history books.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service