As a Democrat, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu is running up against the late stages of partisan realignment. But while the rise of the GOP in the South may end her political career, nobody has ever confused Landrieu for a political neophyte, or accused her of misunderstanding the essence of Louisiana politics.

It’s against that backdrop that she attributed President Obama’s unpopularity in her state, in part, to the fact that “the South has not always been the friendliest place for African Americans.”

As regional or cultural dog whistles go, this is significantly less contestable than, say, the GOP's incessant derision of northern and coastal “values.” But it has provoked a backlash, not just from conservative pols and operatives who have created for themselves a state of denial in which racial politics don’t really exist, but also among professional political analysts, who believe Landrieu made an error by alluding to the South’s racial history in public.

So, @donnabrazile, regardless of the facts, politically should Sen Landrieu have said that to @chucktodd ? — Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) November 1, 2014

Halperin caught some righteous flack on social media, both for cheapening the truth and for dinging a politician who, at worst, was willing to be candid against interest.

But the truth is, I think Halperin’s political analysis is backward, too, and that Landrieu's candor came in the service of her political interest, not against it. His assumption that U.S. politics tends to everywhere favor a willful blindness to racial history is commonly held. But it reflects a dated, '90s-era sense of the partisan tilt of the culture war.