Bryan Goebel

For any supporter of Barack Obama worried about his chances in the South the Nation's Bob Moser has written a book that offers some hope.

In "Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority," one of the best books of the political season, Moser writes "the South's heady half century of rising education levels and unprecedented in-migration, as well as manufacturing job losses since the early 1990s, have made the region fertile territory for a reborn Democratic populism."

Moser says the Democrats' Northern leadership ignored the South in the last two presidential elections, with the exception of Florida, based on the perception that Southerners are dumber, more violent, more racist and more fundamentalist in their religion.

He debunks a lot of those myths and says "the white backlash generation that came out of the 60s that viewed African Americans as fearful and threatening is dying."

In this interview, he talks about how Obama is embracing the South, what the Democrats must do to win the South, the Democrats non-Southern strategy, Howard Dean's fifty state strategy, the racial politics of the South, what's happening on the ground and how the South's population is changing with the rise of more Latino and African American voters.

Recorded September 21, 2008.
A shorter version aired on KCBS October 6, 2008.