Anti-Southern scalawags lose

To the editor:

I thoroughly enjoyed the article by Peter Kinder and Steve Ehlmann, "Voting shifts signal end to Civil War in Missouri" However Kinder has erred when he utilizes voting pattern maps to prove his point.

Georgia Sen. Zell Miller can best describe the reason for Missouri's Southern Democrats crossing party lines when he said: "I did not leave my party. My party left me."

Kinder and Ehlmann seemed to have missed another voting trend that has emerged in Missouri in the past year.

Democratic presidential primary candidate Dick Gephardt only managed to garner 2 percent of Missourians' votes.

During the primary for the Missouri governor's race, Bob Holden became the first governor since the War Between the States to lose a primary.

And during the election of 2004, in spite of massive support (including the NRA), Catherine Hanaway lost her bid to become Missouri secretary of state.

All three of these candidates were anti-Southern scalawags. All three were defeated in the past year.

Missouri Southerners constitute a viable voting block, and they have not forgotten their Southern heritage.

They want the flags restored at Higginsville Confederate Cemetery, where 800 Confederate veterans are buried, and at Fort Davidson State Historic Site in Pilot Knob, where over 200 Confederate veterans are buried in a mass grave.

The question at hand is, whether governor-elect Matt Blunt and lieutenant governor-elect Kinder will listen.

CLINT E. LACY, Vice Chairman, Missouri League of the South, Marble Hill, Mo.