From the Daily Kos:

There's an honest-to-Gosh coastal conceit at work here -- one cooked up in rightwing Washington think tanks and eagerly promulgated by the precious, snarky, self-involved and hopelessly bourgie boarding-schools-then-Harvard-or-Yale-then-Columbia-J-School D.C. and New York media class. It says that all those Midwestern and Southern lumpens in their gauche sweatpants, flannels and crucifixes are slow-witted, pious, fragile and afraid. They of the patriarchal sky gods and the cult of the football just want to be assured that somebody's running things and will discipline anyone that gets out of line. The Dems just have to show that they can be stern in order to get right with rightwing voters.

This is just bullshit, as anyone who's ever been to a Harley rally in Milwaukee or a hunting lodge in the U.P. will surely know. Blue-collar Midwestern and Southern culture is as sacrilegious as it is sanctimonious and as libertine, if not much more so, as it is buttoned-down. Those suburban and exurban true believers in the Bush cause? We don't know them. They're friggin' pod people, those God people. But the Washington and New York cognoscenti look out on the hinterlands and see an undifferentiated mass of Passion-viewing, Terry-and-The-Babies-saving Rapture Christians.

Kos may be right, but to be fair, we've** spent way more time in Alabama than we have New York and on a sheer statistical basis, the incidence of gauche sweatpants-wearing in the South is disturbingly high. The only person we know in in New York who wears sweatpants on a regular basis is S.I. Newhouse.

**We're thinking of ditching the Royal We, as it sounds ridiculous when the three of us are obviously not collectively from Alabama, and we may or may not have found ourselves referring to ourselves in the first person plural in casual conversation last week. We're not even sure why we started doing it in the first place.