"Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States.
But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten, only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure.
Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.
Though Voinovich's views may be shared by others in the party, it's a tad late -- not to mention ungrateful -- to indict the South.
Republicans have been harvesting Southern votes for decades from seeds strategically planted during the civil rights era. When Lyndon B. Johnson predicted in 1965 that the Voting Rights Act meant the South would go Republican for the next 50 years, he wasn't just whistling Dixie.
A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year
captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966
Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy:
"Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, 'burned the paint off the walls.' As they left the hotel, Nixon said, 'This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.' "
