Phillip Tutor offers some perspectives in the Anniston Star about the upcoming Southern Governors’ Association annual convention Aug. 19-21 at the Grove Park Inn (excerpts):
If Southern pride were a tonic, it’d be part whiskey (a hair-on-your-chest drink), part tequila (liquid fire) and part Pabst (ubiquitous and cheap). Merlot would be saved for later. ...

If everyone shows up, imagine this scene from the hotel’s hospitality suite:

Rick Perry, Texas governor, Evangelical leader, occasional secessionist, the nation’s media-crowned job-creator, holding court at the main table.

Haley Barbour, Mississippi governor, Republican mainstay, entertaining convention newcomers in his well-known Southern style.

Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor, one-time GOP rising star, wondering why Perry has passed him by as the Next Big Southern Thing.

Nikki Haley (South Carolina), Bev Perdue (North Carolina) and Mary Fallin (Oklahoma), female executives in a historically all-male fraternity that, thankfully, is no longer all-male. (Look where that’s taken us.)

And somewhere in the suite are others, Alabama’s Robert Bentley and Georgia’s Nathan Deal and Florida’s Rick Scott and the rest. ...

Click link to read the column.