A New, Blue Dixie | The Nation   A New, Blue Dixie    • Share
• Decrease text size Increase text size  It was hot as Hades on
June 5 in the little mountain town of Bristol, Virginia. But
that didn't stop hundreds of southwest Virginians--in the most
staunchly Republican part of a state that hadn't voted
Democratic for president since 1964--from streaming into the
local high school gym to whoop it up for a liberal, mixed-race
fellow from Chicago with a mighty suspicious moniker. Fresh off
his lopsided, nomination-clinching primary victory in North
Carolina, Barack Obama had chosen--to the mystification of
political experts--to launch his general election campaign not
in the "battlegrounds" of Pennsylvania or Ohio but in a remote
Southern backwater containing 17,000 souls who'd given George W.
Bush 64 percent of their vote in 2004.  About the Author  Bob
Moser  Also by the Author    Strangest of all, he spoke to these
people in exactly the same way he had addressed stadiums full of
urbanites in Philadelphia o