George Allen, Presidential Candidate, RIP

The New Republic has more on George Allen's Confederate Flag Fetish. I'm going out on a limb right now to assert that this marks the beginning of the end of George Allen for president . It has died aborning. While one of John McCain's consultants might admit that Allen's romanticization of the Confederacy will win Allen votes in the primary, even some conservatives are beginning to blanch.

On the right, a debate is now brewing about what Allen's four-decade embrace of the Confederate flag means for his presidential ambitions. Some are bothered by the revelations. At the influential conservative website Redstate.com, the blogger TheCollegian, who volunteered for Allen in 1993, writes, "George Allen did not simply adopt an affection for the South, but the South at a certain time: a time when it was fighting to keep slavery legal. Even this would be ok if he had some family tie to the region at that time, but he doesn't. I find that to be disturbing."

George Allen may well be a good man. He may well be reformed, and this is an unfortunate issue that will haunt him in disproportion to what he stands for now. But in the end, it is not as if we are newly coming to the realization that embracing the Confederacy is wrong. This criticism is not presentism at work. Even in the context of 1973, to embrace the Confederacy was also to embrace Neoconfederate thought, to embrace opposition to the Civil Rights movement and all that it gained. But in the context of 1993 or 1997 0r 2000? Allen chose the symbolism by which he rose to prominence. That such symbolism will now prove politically limiting seems like the perfect form of poetic justice. It is, as C. Vann Woodward might have observed, an irony of Southern history.