Sorry is the hardest word

In a recent interview with the Des Moines Register, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean said he wanted to be "the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." At the "Rock the Vote" debate held in Boston last Tuesday, Dean was lambasted repeatedly by his Democratic rivals for his comments. To their credit, all the other candidates stopped short of calling him a bigot, but they all, with the exception of Carol Moseley Braun, insisted he was too arrogant to admit that he had, indeed, made a mistake. And the consensus was that Dean needed to apologize for the pain and outrage he had caused among black Americans.\nSen. John Edwards told Dean he was the last person they needed to come to the South to tell them how to do things. He went on to say he had grown up in the South and most of the people he knew didn't ride around in pick-up trucks with Confederate flags. The intent of this attack was to tell Dean he was not the person who might succeed at getting those voters to come back to the Democratic party. But according to recent poll results, neither is Sen. Edwards.\nDean tried to explain his remark by quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., as he said that he was only arguing that Democrats had to win the support of all voters -- in particular Southern whites who had fled to the Republican Party -- to be competitive in 2004.\nThe Rev. Al Sharpton then jumped to his feet saying, "You can't bring a Confederate flag to the table of brotherhood. And you can't misquote Martin Luther King like that. I came out of the King movement; I didn't just read (about) him." But given the acerbity of this attack, I think it is safe to say that Rev. Sharpton has never tried to sit at the table of brotherhood with any of those who are most apt to unfurl the Confederate flag, so how can he be so sure it won't work? \nAt the same debate, a young black man by the name of the Sekou Diyday, who is a buyer for a supermarket chain, told Dean he was "extremely offended" by the statement and asked what Dean planned to do, if elected, to show sensitivity toward the issue of slavery and black Americans in this country. That's what ground my grits, because this well-dressed, well-spoken and gainfully employed man still equates his life, which ain't too shabby by most standards, to a long defunct system of enforced servitude.\nIn this era of so-called "compassionate" conservatism, there is no shortage of things that both offend and frighten me, but slavery and the Confederate flag certainly aren't among them.\nWhat offends me more than any old piece of fabric is the fact that . . . \n•154 soldiers have died from hostile fire since the end of so-called major combat in Iraq. \n•"Conservative" and "liberal" are terms that have metastasized from ideologies into coats of arms. \n•Many voters have been wooed by slick sound bites and glib rhetoric to the point that we're neither asking nor answering one important question, "Am I truly better off now than I was three years ago?"\nIf a simple "I'm sorry" were the one salve that ameliorates, we'd be living in the United States of the Comfortably Numb. And if the Confederate flag and Dean's desire to win the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised were the biggest problems facing black America today, we'd all be asking the question, "Al who"