This is what the urban, ex-Trotskyite, South-bashing Neocons have been telling us for 11 years now, going back to Christopher Caldwell's Atlantic Monthly article titled "The Southern Captivity of the GOP."
Item: NeoCons don't like the South or Southerners. They're urban ethnics who walked away from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the 60's after the Left took it over and started bashing Israel. That was 40 years after the urban-ethnic bloc votes (Italian, Irish, Jewish, Polish, some other blocs in various cities) took the Democratic Party away from the rural Jeffersonian Democrats in 1928 to nominate urban Irish Catholic Al Smith, and then Franklin Roosevelt, and refounded the Democratic Party on the "principles" of Tammany Hall "wardheel welfarism," which they eventually turned into State Socialism.
Item: The NeoCon critique, that Southern Good Ole Boys naturally disgust and repel people in other parts of the country, is some deft catering to their own prejudice. It's the intellectual equivalent of saying, "Please don't bring your black friend into this restaurant -- the other patrons might object." Well, whose prejudice is it really?
Item: The NeoCon critique didn't stop GWB from being elected President twice, even though the Leftstream Media painted Bush as a hate-puppet with attributes of Gomer Pyle, Festus, and Bonzo the Chimp.
Item: The GOP got nailed in 2006 on ethical issues -- the grounds Nancy Pelosi originally chose to fight out the election on, but had to cool it for a while after Rep. Jefferson (D-La.) got caught by the FBI with a zillion dollars in sleazy cash in his freezer. Ooops. But Nancy went back to that grift, and Rahm Emanuel secured a lineup of conservative-sounding 'Rats like (Exhibit A) Senator Jim Webb of Virginia. Emanuel, old Clintonista SuperRat that he is, suckered the voters. And he was only able to do it, because the GOP was severely embarrassed by a bunch of people whose ethics fell down around their ankles in an election year, which killed a key part of the appeal and message of social conservativism, of personal integrity, honesty, and morality. Pelosi and Emanuel, with the help of a Ratweasel gay Democratic House staffer who outed Mark Foley (R-Fla.), and prosecutions of GOP House members, basically sent the voters the competing message that ALL REPUBLICANS = CORRUPT HYPOCRITES SO VOTE FOR US.
It wasn't conservatives who stayed home on election day. It wasn't Midwestern Republicans fleeing in terror from the black-robed mullahs of the Christian Right. It was indies and Reagan Democrats who walked away from the GOP -- because the GOP Congressional leadership and the RNC let the voters down, bigtime. Want names? Denny Hastert, Ken Mehlman, Tom DeLay (although there may be some mitigating factors for Tom -- he was being tried in the media by a lowlife 'Rat operative circus-clown prosecutor in Austin, in what the 'Rat pols and papers managed to turn into a big political show-trial operation). The House leadership allowed the 'Rats, in a long-planned, carefully thought-out attack on the core message of the GOP, to paint them as untrue to the principles of the Contract With America and to the basic civic virtues Americans have always wanted to see in candidates for office.
The 'Rat attack was a thing of beauty. They bit the baby and got away with it. They didn't even have to promise anything really, not even to "stop the war". They just pointed the finger and stood around looking ..... conservative.
Well, they aren't, so that will open a bit of daylight for the GOP to fight it out with them in 2008, after the crazies have been lurching to the Stalinist Left for a couple of years.
The RNC has to clean the stables, and it has to be seen to clean the stables, between now and 2008. Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen with the Bush family, with its noblesse oblige loyalty toward its Oort-cloud of Bushie political operatives, still firmly in charge of the Party and the RNC, so.......