America/Conor O'Clery: It was as if Gerry Adams had said UDA members would be best served by Sinn Féin's social economic policies and was then accused of supporting loyalist paramilitaries.
When Howard Dean told the Des Moines Register last week: "I still want to be the candidate for guys with confederate flags in their pick-up trucks", the former Vermont governor was jumped on by his rivals in the Democratic presidential race, who accused him of pandering to racist white southerners.
Dean was actually referring to a statement he made in February to the Democratic National Committee about tackling the race issue head on. "You know what?" he said. "White folks in the south who drive pick-up trucks with confederate flag decals \ on the back ought to be voting with us because their kids don't have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too."
The remark was cheered by whites and blacks in the audience who understood he was saying that Democrats should not give up on poor people who didn't share their view on civil rights and who voted against their own economic interests.
Dean was thrown on the defensive when a questioner at a Boston presidential debate on Tuesday said he was offended by his desire to be the candidate for "guys with confederate flags on their pick-up trucks".
After toughing it out for two days, Dean eventually apologised for his "clumsy" handling of a sensitive topic. Senator John Kerry, trailing Dean 38-24 among voters in New Hampshire, continued to rub it in by accusing Dean, a member of the National Rifle Association who once refused to vote against assault weapons, of sucking up to southern pro-gun whites.
With his secular outlook and his record in favour of gay civil unions, Dean is clearly desperate to try to find some way of getting to the conservative "redneck" vote. Despite the flap, he secured the endorsement of the big, racially diverse Services Employees International Union, a blow to Kerry and to Dick Gephardt, who sees himself as the candidate of organised labour.
With Mr Wesley Clark's campaign failing to catch fire so far, it looks increasingly likely now that Dean will be the party's choice for 2004.
Just how tough the landscape is for liberal Democrats in the Deep South was underscored by the announcement of conservative Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia that he will vote for George Bush next year. Miller dismissed Dean as someone who knows as much about the south "as a hog knows about Sunday" and predicted that the Democratic nominee would lose as badly in 2004 as anti-war candidate George McGovern did in 1972.
Independent pollster John Zogby agreed that Democrats were not communicating with southerners on social and cultural issues. This helped Republicans seize control of two southern states, Mississippi and Kentucky, where elections for governor were held on Tuesday and the cultural differences were exploited.
When President Bush campaigned for Haley Barbour in Mississippi last week, he praised him as a man of good values who treasured his relationship with the Almighty. The subtext of the campaign was the (failed) attempt by incumbent Democratic Governor Ronnie Musgrove to remove the Confederate cross from the state flag.
In Kentucky, Bush praised Republican candidate Ernie Fletcher as a man who valued his faith and his family and could be looked up to with pride by his children. Here the subtext was the sexual scandal which disgraced outgoing Democratic Governor Paul Patton. The 65- year-old governor's mistress Tina Conner broke off their affair while he was in office and said on television that Patton wrecked her state-regulated nursing-home business in revenge.
Hell hath no fury like a governor scorned. It was hardly coincidence that conservative radio played Your Cheatin' Heart a lot in Kentucky in recent weeks.
The culture wars also left CBS sprawling in the dust this week. The TV network spent $9 million making a four-hour mini-series on Ronald Reagan to be shown next week. It credited Reagan with bringing down the Soviet Union but included scenes that showed him to be forgetful and manipulated by his wife.
In one scene Nancy Reagan forced the president to get rid of top aide Al Haig. In another, when asked to do more for AIDS victims, he replied coldly: "They that live in sin shall die in sin."
When excerpts from the script leaked to the press, the Republican National Committee kicked up a row, conservative talk radio went into full attack mode, and a website, boycottcbs. com, called on supporters not to let the "Hollywood Left" smear the Reagans.
Seeing its advertising revenue threatened, CBS panicked, first making cuts in the series, which executives had passed as a fair portrayal of the Reagans, then transferring it to a little-watched cable channel next spring.
This was decided "solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy", said CBS, prompting cynical responses along the lines of "If you believe that then I can sell you a bridge in Brooklyn".
This humiliating climbdown, furiously attacked by Democrats as censorship from the right, represented a big victory for the New Media, where the national agenda is often shaped by conservative talk shows, which for example were the driving force behind California's recall election. CBS was also vulnerable to charges of bad taste: Reagan, a cultural icon for the right, is suffering from advanced Alzheimers.
Another docu-drama will air next week which is based on a tale of really dubious veracity. The NBC film dramatises the rescue in Iraq of Private Jessica Lynch, first seen on green-tinted action video released by the US military.
Ms Lynch, who came to symbolise American bravery in the war, has now angrily accused the army of misrepresenting her ordeal for propaganda purposes.
It bothered her that "they used me as a way to symbolise all this stuff", she told NBC in the first interview since she came home. The official version of her fate, "leaked" to a gullible media, has since been discredited.
Ms Lynch did not empty her magazine at Iraqi attackers as was said. She was injured in a vehicle crash, her gun jammed, she passed out and Iraqi medical staff saved her life. The hospital was in friendly hands when the Schwarzenegger-types came in with guns blazing.
"It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," said Ms Lynch, who also has no memory of being raped, an allegation by army doctors made in a book written by Rick Bragg, a former New York Times reporter.