Sherman's Second March?

He was not a southern citizen in late 1864 feeling the effects of Sherman’s March to the sea as the Union general waged psychological warfare on civilians to break the will of his enemy. However, I believe that Adam Nossiter would agree with anyone claiming the heavy hush of Southern air during that winter was similarly unsettling to that of the historic night of November 4, 2008. I’m certain he’d maintain that in the wake of senator Barack Obama’s election to the highest office in America, it would seem that the South has been torched and ravaged yet again. But this time record numbers of voters willing to vote for a black man replaced Union soldiers. True, the South has lost its position as the most politically potent region due to the social progress of America as a whole. But despite Nossiter’s rhetoric, this must not be viewed as an extension of Sherman’s March, Obama is not on a mission to pillage and plunder.
In his article For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics, Adam Nossiter discusses the end of the “centrality of the South to national politics” (Nossiter, Par. 2). Nossiter claims that by going so wholly for the loser the South has eradicated itself from the necessary ingredients to a presidential victory. With an obvious bias against the South’s conservative leanings Nossiter proceeds to explain why the South has lost its political potency. “An influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years” has resulted in states such as Virginia and North Carolina supporting Obama (Nossiter, Par. 4). Also, “Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally” (Nossiter, Par. 7). This extreme divergence from the norm around the country, Nossiter argues, has begun to spell and end to Nixon’s Southern Strategy. He asserts the South’s political power has been maximized by the GOP, and can only weaken. These claims are certainly very plausible. I think most would agree with him on some of these points.
Unfortunately, Nossiter ventures on to make his article’s focus on the claim that “Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats” (Nossiter, Par. 14). He cites the fact that Obama got nearly half of the support that John Kerry received from southern whites as evidence of this. He would have us believe Obama’s election was so opposed by conservatives in the South that some of them spontaneously combusted on the night of November 4. Whether or not Obama’s race had anything to do with an almost solidly red South, Nossiter’s focus in the article is in the wrong place. The tone of his article is equally backward as he may label some of the Appalachian citizens who cast their votes for Senator McCain due to his skin color.
Obama was not elected despite of the stagnant racial views in the South, as much as, because of the social progress that America has made as a nation. This is why the South appears to have been stripped of what was once supreme political potency; the rest of the nation has advanced enough to make the views of the region a minority. There is no room for the tone of Nossiter’s article, one of desperation due to a dying way of life, in the constructive discussion of the South’s political future. No one is being burned out of their home by President-Elect Obama. His administration will not plunder and ravage conservative citizens of the South. And both sides must get rid of a rhetoric that would suggest this if this nation wishes to continue down the path of social progress.