David Beasley has stated nationally that he lost his governorship by switching sides on the Confederate flag in South Carolina. Here was a losing strategy, and there is nothing that respectable conservatives go for more hungrily than something that is bound to lose. So they smacked their traditionalist constituency in the teeth in 2000 on the flag, exactly as they did in 1962 on Mississippi. Only the Chamber of Commerce and liberal opinion matters. To hell with the base vote of working whites and people who see themselves as Southerners, not as mere economic conservatives.
Respectable conservatives have no memory.
They think they are doing something new. But for someone who has a political memory, they are doing the same old disastrous thing one more time. From that day forward I was a Goldwater Republican, and dedicated my efforts to getting him nominated. Lake and I and others pushed the Southern Strategy for winning the presidency long before it became popular. If Kennedy had not been assassinated, something we could hardly anticipate, we would have done very well in 1964, and set the Republican Party's course to conservatism from then on.