IN THE MAIL: Bob Moser’s Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority. Judging from the cover copy, Moser’s thesis is that Democrats have been telling themselves a comforting tale of Southern racism and Republican perfidy to explain why they’ve lost the South, when the real story “speaks less to the principled nobility of non-Southern liberals than to an uneasy melding of arrogance and willful ignorance.” That seems about right to me.