Our South, Our Selves.

NEW ORLEANS -- My column last week, "Going South," apparently struck a nerve deep in the heart of a few Dixie-o-maniacs. A couple of our Southern cousins rebuked me for a statement that I still think is pretty obvious. Face it: A whole lot of rural Southerners make a pastime, if not an article of faith, out of despising liberals, Yankees and people who aren't entirely white.

Call it my personal prejudice. Call it Northern bigotry galore. But Christian fundamentalists are the foundation of Bush's support in the Deep South. In my adventures flying into, and out of, little towns from Delaware to the Delta, the big difference for many between the right political choice and the wrong one is religious. Yes, for many, it is that simple.

As one older white hotel worker in Athens, Ga. succinctly put it, he will be voting for Bush because "he's a good Christian. He has family values." This, despite high oil prices and a disastrous war, is the simple political catechism that echoes through much of the South.

Tellingly, like many now living in Dixie, that particular conservative gentleman originally hails from far north of the Mason-Dixon Line. A Vietnam vet, he's a transplant from Erie.

That fundamentalist dogma is hatched up North wouldn't shock Rob Hirtz, an ex-CP political guru now living in North Carolina who e-mailed last week to remind me that "a Bible Belt wraps much more tightly around Pennsylvania than anywhere in the South."

Underlining Rob's point that the commonwealth is sometimes more deeply Southern than the South, Hugh Campbell -- having grown up in South Carolina, he's now studying in the Northeast -- also wrote to suggest that I fly "a few loops around" Pennsylvania if I wanted to survey a diverse and abundant crop of ignorance.

When it comes to the sheer number of numb nuts, the Southern Poverty Law Center finds more hate groups in Pennsylvania than in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia or Kentucky.

Maybe so, but Pennsylvania is still a presidential tossup that, unlike our Southern cousins, didn't fall for Bush in 2000. And that was before a pointless war and pricey oil.

Still, for the Democrats to salvage the South and to keep Pennsylvania, the strategy will be the same: They must find the right political rhetoric to neutralize the Republican's stealthy religious subtext.

That will be a difficult line to find. But as I continue my redneck tour of the South, I'll be listening for it and hoping to hear more ideas from you.

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