The Little Brown Reader

"Bush can forget about the Solid South," says Roger Chastain, president of a textile company. "There's no Solid South anymore." Chastain told the New York Times that the massive loss of jobs (2.5 million nationally) since Bush took office, and anger over the stagnant pace of economic recovery, makes the president vulnerable in a region his party has long taken for granted. Lynn Mayson, a mother of three, and unemployed for months, put it bluntly: "I'm not going to vote for Bush unless things change. The economy has got to get better." Both Chastain and Mayson are registered Republicans, part of the "solid south" that helped Bush win office in 2000.