Another Sign It's Worse than We Thought

Just read this in my local newspaper: In Alabama voters elected to the state Supreme Court Tom Parker, a former aide to Roy Moore, the ousted former chief judge of that court who personally erected a monument to the Ten Commandments on court grounds. During the campaign, Parker handed out tiny Confederate flags and associated with pro-Confederacy groups.

But wait. It gets worse! Voters in Alabama also rejected Amendment 2, which would have stricken from the state constitution old language mandating segregated schools and imposing poll taxes -- an old segregationist policy aimed at keeping blacks and some poor whites from voting. Supreme Court decisions have rendered both aspects of the constitution moot but that didn't convince Alabama voters to clean up the language in their prime governing document.

Some hope remains that continued counting of provisional ballots may reverse this narrow defeat. But the fact that it was even a close race leads one to ask -- what values exactly are Democrats supposed to espouse to win back the South?