Whether Kael ever said literally what she is widely quoted as saying is beside the point. Her supposed bewilderment about the results of the 1972 election epitomizes the isolation chamber that too many leftist coastal elites exist in.

Unfortunately, the left is not alone in being less attuned to middle America than the median voter is. A very large percentage of the more prominent voices on the center right are based in the Beltway, New York City, Minneapolis, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Miami, or other blue enclaves.

This is basically a positive. It helps conservatism to have some dissenting voices embedded in blue America. And no one can question the commitment of blue state conservatives, whose political lives are significantly more challenging than their red state counterparts’.

But there are negative aspects to the situation, and one of those is a potential blind spot regarding the way the bulk of red America sees certain issues and candidates. Blue state conservatives are more likely to see in a politician such as Mitt Romney a regular guy who speaks without an accent; whereas to red state conservatives, it’s W whose English and values are standard and Romney, Giuliani, etc. who are “accented.”

I’m not saying that either side is wrong. But they are different, and as they start with different assumptions they unsurprisingly sometimes end up in different places. Thus the unexpected, to the center right punditry, results of the recent South Carolina Republican poll:

McCain        25
Giuliani        20
Thompson   16
Gingrich       12
Romney         8

Although McCain and Gingrich aren’t Southerners as Thompson is, each more than holds his own here simply by being a well-known mainstream conservative who hasn’t had to make the large number of compromises with conservative principals that the two northeastern candidates have. Recognition may be something of an issue here too, for Romney and Thompson, as they are not yet as high profile in general as they are in the blogosphere.

The problem here is not southern aversion to Mormonism or to Giuliani’s Catholicism. It is simply that Giuliani and Romney become less attractive candidates the further one moves away from the preconceptions of Boston. If one approaches things from the mindset that Bush is too southern, too religious, too unrefined, (and says nucular), then of course a candidate such as Romney looks more appealing. And since the hate Bush crowd on the left, among whom blue state conservatives live and whose exhalations they breathe second-hand, does obsess over southern and western language, religion, dress, etc., it can seem natural to try to appease their wrath by offering them a Romney instead of a Fred Thomson.

Red America is centered (electoral vote weighted wise) somewhere around Memphis. Yet its most prominent voices are located far from this center. Some of the center right perhaps needs to do a better job of truly wrapping its head around red state America, beyond just intellectually recognizing its existence. At least, if they don’t want to delude themselves about the actual appeal of a Giuliani or a Romney across 100 million Republican voters nationwide, they do.

Update: I wrote the above before reading the following by NRO’s Rich Lowry, which was written from a profoundly non-Southern point of view. I don’t say anti-Southern, or mean to imply as much.

Romney deserves to be judged as an individual, on his own merits for higher office.

Those are considerable. He is so unlike George W. Bush in his articulate, well-groomed polish that he probably should be hailed as the first-ever metrosexual candidate for president. Indeed, rather than recoiling at his Mormonism, Republican primary voters may conclude that the handsome, “golly”-exclaiming, (newly) down-the-line conservative is simply too good to be true.

The liberal use of the a-word when favorably comparing their chosen candidates to drawling southerners like W is common among blue state conservatives. I can’t help but note with amusement how much less permissible it is to refer to Obama as “articulate” (an implied slur on Sharptonese) than it is to refer to Romney as articulate compared to Bush.