Governor Dean’s campaign spent the weekend scurrying to fend off attacks about his pandering to white Southern voters. The flap began when the former leader of Vermont was quoted in Saturday’s Des Moines Register as saying, “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.” The other Democrats immediately sensed an opening. Congressman Gephardt insisted he would be the candidate “for the guys with American flags in their pickup trucks.”

Senator Lieberman called Dr. Dean’s statement “irresponsible and reckless,” General Clark declared that “the only flag we should fly is the one that brings us together — the Stars and Stripes,” while another Southerner, Senator Edwards, called the doctor’s remark “offensive” and Senator Kerry reckoned he would “rather be the candidate of the NAACP than the NRA.”

The man from Montpelier no doubt senses that he needs to broaden his base of support. He promptly released a statement saying he wanted “people with Confederate flags on their trucks to put down those flags and vote Democratic.” He said the votes of Southern white working families are essential to defeating President Bush. His statement went on to accuse his Democratic opponents of dividing working people by race.

As Paul Tsongas, Michael Dukakis, and John Andersen showed, a politician can’t get elected president of America by drawing support mainly from the Volvo set. The electoral vote and even the primary-delegate math is such that candidates need backing from some guys in pickup trucks, too.

Where Dr. Dean has gone wrong, by our lights, is in choosing the issues on which to make his appeal to the pickup-truck drivers. His error is no doubt owing to the left-wing marginality of the ground Dr. Dean has staked out on economic and foreign policy. On taxes, Dr. Dean says that he wants to roll back the entire Bush tax cut, which puts him to the left of Messrs. Kerry, Edwards, and Lieberman, who want to preserve the tax cuts for families making less than $150,000 or $200,000 a year. In other words, Dr. Dean wants to raise taxes on the guys in the pickup trucks.

With respect to foreign policy, Dr. Dean opposed both the war in Iraq and the $87 billion to support the American troops there and in Afghanistan. That puts him to the left of Messrs. Gephardt and Lieberman, who supported both the war and the $87 billion, and to the left of Messrs. Kerry and Edwards, who at least supported the war, if not the supplemental spending.

Yet we don’t have the slightest doubt that the ordinary American driving a pickup truck understands President Bush’s formulation that “during the last few decades, the terrorists grew to believe that if they hit America hard — as in Lebanon and Somalia — America would retreat and back down.…Leaving Iraq prematurely would only embolden the terrorists and increase the danger to America. We are determined to stay, to fight, and to win.”

So if Dr. Dean doesn’t have much to offer in the way of economic or foreign policy, it’s no wonder he’s resorting to other issues. If Dr. Dean wants to make the right to keep and bear arms his cause in the Democratic primary, we wish him luck. But in the general election, we have a feeling President Bush is going to gain the serious voters on this issue.

So at the end of the day, what his Southern strategy is going to boil down to is the Confederate flag, that is, to nursing the kind of issues on which the Republicans just threw over Old Trent Lott. What an irony. There are those who reckon the Vermont doctor may well win the nomination. If so, it’ll be quite something to see him go weaving down the campaign trail in that pickup truck, a load of Ben & Jerry’s in the back and a Confederate flag flapping in the breeze.