The author of this article reeks on anti-southern sentiment. I hate it when fools like him write about how the south is full of dumb racists who refuse to embrace "change." I'm sure no one talked about the south breaking the shackles of the confederacy when they voted Republican for the first time in 1972 after being solidly Democrat since the Civil War.
I'm not so sure that the opinion writer is so anti-Southern (VA, NC, and NC went for Obama, and GA was one of the few close-misses) as you think. It seems that this time the GOP won the poor whites who went not so long ago for either Clinton ('96, '92) or Carter ('76). Are poor whites that different from poor blacks and Hispanics who went for Obama?
Obama, I believe, wrote off the South early as places of likely victory. Virginia is no longer particularly Southern; Florida has long been so full of non-Southerners (the American North, Latin America) that it can't be considered truly Southern; North Carolina has been getting an influx of Northerners that its Southern heritage. North Carolina was something of a surprise, and Obama wrote off Georgia only when McCain started to show a chance of winning a couple of states (MI, PA) that Obama absolutely had to win.
It is possible that the South is more supportive of the military than are other regions, so it was more likely to vote heavily for a war hero who had made huge sacrifices for his country. It is also possible that much of the South is more xenophobic than the rest of America. Obama is definitely not a Southerner, and even if he is a black man, he is not the sort of black man with whom Southerners have much familiarity. Give Tennessee some credit for having come close to voting for Harold Ford, a black man who at the least has an unambiguously Southern heritage, in a political climate similar to that of 2008 (2006).
Kerry may have lost the South when exposures came out that his father had been born in Austria with the name Kohn. Joseph Lieberman was obviously no political asset in any Southern state. The South firmly rejected Mike Dukakis. I question whether a candidate with the surname like Kowalski, Hansen, Antonelli, or Takahashi from Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, or California could have done much better than Obama did in the core and upper South this time. McCain is the sort of Scots-Irish surname that one might expect to find in a telephone book in Greenwood, Mississippi -- in part because John McCain's grandfather was from there.
Unlike much of the rest of the country, the South attracted few European immigrants in the sixty or so years after the Civil War. The South had no obvious attractions for people who saw freehold farming, industrial labor, small-business formation, or education as paths to family success. Abysmal education, starvation pay, a feudal social structure, land under control of planters who were unwilling to sell, hidebound tradition, and no good markets for start-up merchants all signified what European immigrants were trying to avoid because they knew much the same in those parts of Europe that they were from. The South has since changed, but not quite not enough to become indistinguishable from New England or Pennsylvania.
Harold Ford demonstrates that the issue isn't race. Obama's campaign was tailor-made for the realities of an urban America (and Suburbia has become far more urban than rural) even in the logistics of campaigning. The South is still far more rural than any region in America except for the Upper Plains, and Obama found campaigning in Richmond VA, Charlotte NC, or Orlando FL far easier and more productive than campaigning in Enterprise AL, Brookhaven MS, or Malvern AR. He would have won Georgia if it were more urban, and his 2008 electoral campaign is still premature for Texas (even if Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and El Paso are ready for him).
Obama could campaign effectively in small-town America -- as shown in Iowa -- when he was campaigning exclusively in Iowa during the Iowa primary. But once the campaign went national, where did one expect Obama to campaign -- where he could get large crowds and meet lots of voters in a State considered a "swing" state (like Dayton OH) or in some place where the rewards for his efforts were slight at best (Dayton TN)? Obama won an election as much on time management as he did on issues. Harold Ford could campaign in rural Tennessee; Obama couldn't.
Obama has not yet written off the South in 2012. It is possible that he will run the government in a way that serves poor people -- including poor whites in the South. Obama would love to improve the lot of poor southern blacks who voted for him in huge proportions, but he can't do so without also helping poor whites whom the Hard Right has done practically no discernible good. Should Obama reach poor Southern whites as did Carter (in 1976) and Clinton, he wins a landslide re-election.
I don't see Obama as a vindictive person toward people who "voted wrong". He just might need the votes of Southern whites to win re-election in 2012 if a bunch of things go wrong between now and 2012.