Tuesday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• Rachel Sylvester: Gordon Brown, the snail finds it hard to be a whale
• David Aaronovitch: I'll eat my hat if Dr Crippen was innocent - OK?
• Joan Bakewell: Prison - a cruel and unusual punishment for a woman
• Mick Hume: Can't pay for your palace? Then get out
• Chris Ayres: Will Smith's school deserves to avoid cult status
• Matthew Syed: John Motson bought into his own cult of celebrity
• Bronwen Maddox: An extra trophy – but supporters are in disarray
• Ann Treneman: NHS: the real world punctures Westminster bubble
• Gerard Baker: Equity investors get gloomy message at last
• Leading Article: The NHS: World Class Care Costs
• Leading Article: Oiling Iraq's Revival
• Leading Article: SOS, RIP

And from the rest of the papers...

• Boris Johnson: (The Telegraph) - If sitting on our backsides were a sport, we'd be world champions
• John Bolton: (The Telegraph) - North Korea nuclear deal with US 'like police truce with Mafia'
• Gill Hornby: (The Telegraph) - £40m really isn't enough to make a palace fit for a queen
• Leading Article: (The Telegraph) - 'Eco-towns' will fall victim to economics
• Polly Toynbee: (The Guardian) - For all the hyperbole, Bevan would have approved of this
• Nick Clegg: (The Guardian) - A home for progressives
• Simon Tisdall: (The Guardian) - Mugabe is weakened, but he still won't back down
• Dominic Lawson: (The Independent) - Meet the new Obama, master of the U-turn
• Juan Cruz: (The Independent) - Olé, España! (But we're still a divided country ...)
• Steve Richards: (The Independent) - The abiding lesson of the NHS is that people still look to the state in their hour of need
• Leading Article: (The Independent) - Diminished and discredited
• Max Hastings: (The Daily Mail) - Please don't take after your father, William
• Gideon Rachman: (The Financial Times) - How Obama can avoid the Carter trap

And from around the world...

• Thomas F. Schaller: (The New York Times) - The South will fall again
• David Brooks: (The New York Times) - Obama's money class
• Anne Applebaum: (The Washington Post) - Nationalism gets its kicks
• Bret Stephens: (The Wall Street Journal) - Global warming as mass neurosis
• Jonathan David Farley: (International Herald Tribune) - The lost colonies
• Fatih Cekirge: (Hurriyet) - The most critical sentence of Turkish army's statement

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Thomas Schaller on Southern states in the American presidential election.
From the days of Thomas Jefferson, a strong believer in states' rights and minimum federal government, the South gravitated strongly to the Democratic column for decades, which was strengthened by its belief that Lincoln's Republicans forced Southern Secession and the Civil War. And it resented post-Civil War Reconstruction, which gave power to emancipated blacks, who voted Republican at the polls.
In the 20th-century Richard Nixon initiated "the Southern strategy" of prying white voters away from the Democrats, and Ronald Reagan extended this process. Before them the power of Republicans in the region would have been difficult to imagine. Hence the polarization between African American voters and a significant number of white voters in the South a good deal of the time. Barack Obama has to negotiate this difficult terrain as best he can to win at least some of those states.
I live in populous Washington-oriented northern Virginia, which in recent years has helped elect two successive Democratic Governors, and know that there is a sharp divide between it and the more rural parts of the state. The professor is right to say that Obama has a reasonable chance of carrying Virginia.