Eleven Southern states compose the Old Confederacy. The last Democratic nominee, John Kerry, won zip and lost 11. The previous nominee, Al Gore, won zip and lost 11. Indeed, all the Democratic nominees since 1980 have combined to win nine and lose 68 - a record of failure not seen in the annals of competition since Casey Stengel's '62 Mets.

Yet Democrats persist in thinking they can score on the GOP's home turf - as evidenced, this time around, by Barack Obama's decision to spend roughly $8 million (and that's just his initial outlay) to sell himself in TV ads in four Southern states. This weekend, Obama is opening 20 campaign offices in Virginia, a state that hasn't voted Democratic since 1964. Either he's smart to make these moves, which are designed to expand the battlefield, or he's merely the latest Democrat to play Captain Ahab in a futile pursuit of the party's great white whale.

Lots of Democratic strategists believe it's nuts to whistle Dixie; one prominent commentator-academic, Thomas Schaller, has insisted for years that the reflexive Democratic urge to look southward is a "counterproductive exercise" and that the party should instead look westward in its quest to tally 270 electoral votes. Even Southern-born President Clinton - while winning four Dixie states in his '96 reelection race - barely finished first in the tally of all Southern voters, performing far better outside his own region.

On the other hand, consider this factoid: No Democrat has ever won the presidency without capturing some Southern states. This year, the Old Confederacy holds 153 electoral votes. Nationwide, there are 538 electoral votes on the table. Do the math. If Obama cedes Dixie, he has to win 72 percent of the electoral votes everywhere else. And that's one reason why Howard Dean, the party chairman, has long been touting the importance of a "50-state strategy" to ensure a broader playing field.

The hitch, however, is contemporary Dixie's antipathy toward national Democrats. It all started with race. President Lyndon Johnson's signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act triggered massive white flight into the Republican Party. In subsequent decades, the GOP built Southern dominance by masterfully exploiting that sentiment - stoking white hostility toward welfare and affirmative action. A top party leader, Ken Mehlman, acknowledged this a few years ago, while addressing the NAACP: "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today, as the Republican chairman, to tell you we were wrong." (Now he tells us.)

But the Democrats face a number of cultural obstacles. Dixie is ground zero for the evangelical Christians. Dixie is far more inhospitable to labor unions than other regions; in North Carolina, one of the states Obama is currently targeting, roughly 3.7 percent of the workers are unionized - which puts North Carolina last in the national rankings. Dixie is also festooned with military bases, which host roughly half of all U.S. military personnel situated stateside. Dixie is also home to millions of service retirees.

So it's fair to wonder: How can an African American upstart from Chicago, with scant national security credentials, expect to pick off any of these states? The South hasn't broadly supported a Northern Democrat since JFK in 1960, before the fallout over civil rights.

Obama, to his credit, is plucking the right chords in his new ads. A commercial playing in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida seeks to place Obama's personal journey at the heart of the American dream, thereby echoing what North Carolina Democratic chairman Jerry Meek told me two years ago when he sought to describe his ideal '08 nominee: "We need to hear a life story that Southerners can appreciate. A life story that embodies the theme of America as a land of hope and opportunity."

Notably, Obama's ad buy has targeted only four Dixie states. The region is not monolithic, and he hopes to take advantage. For instance, Virginia has been trending Democratic since the dawn of the Bush era; Democratic voters, notably upscale non-Southerners and newly arrived Hispanics, now dominate the increasingly populous Washington suburbs. Obama is particularly focused on Fairfax County, a large suburban county west of Washington, where he has reportedly placed paid workers in each of the nine districts.

North Carolina has a huge black population, and millions of transplanted Northerners in the academic triangle that includes Chapel Hill - perhaps enough to give Obama a real shot, although the state hasn't voted Democratic since 1976. Georgia, too, has a huge black electorate, plus it has homeboy Bob Barr, the former congressman now running as the Libertarian candidate, who could bleed conservative votes away from John McCain. At the least, Obama might force McCain to expend precious resources just to defend a state that would normally be a slam dunk.

As for Florida, perhaps the zeitgeist has changed. New Democratic voter signups have outpaced their GOP counterparts by a 7-1 ratio since the start of the year - and that's without the Obama camp trying to register anybody. Besides, you know already that Florida is not a typical Southern state, especially if you've ever stood in line for the early-bird special in Fort Lauderdale.

There's no way to know whether Obama will stick in the region, or pull out early as Kerry did. It ultimately could depend on Southern reaction to the most important news event of the campaign - the first Obama-McCain debate - and whether Obama hits the themes Dixie holds dear. He may ultimately find more fertile turf in the newly blue-trending Western states of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. But it's safe to say that if a black guy with a liberal record can penetrate Dixie, this election truly should be considered transformative.