Steve Jarding and Dave “Mudcat” Saunders are on a mission to bring Southern whites back into the Democratic fold. Or, more accurately, the political consulting team is doing it the other way around. They want the Democratic Party to return to its populist roots, which will make it appealing to working class and rural voters again.

They have had some success, especially in Mudcat’s home state of Virginia where they helped turn rural, normally GOP precincts out in support of telecom magnate Mark Warner, who was elected governor, and is now on the short list of Democratic presidential nominees for 2008. Even when their candidates have lost, Jarding and Mudcat have made some noise: They were behind former Florida Sen. Bob Graham’s sponsorship of a NASCAR truck during the 2004 presidential primaries. (They also consulted briefly on former N.C. Sen. John Edwards’ presidential campaign.)

This year Jarding and Mudcat are working on the campaign of James Webb, a former Republican — and Reagan appointee, no less — to unseat Sen. George Allen of Virginia. Allen is formidable, but he has been thick as thieves with the Bushies, and Webb plans to make the president’s incompetence an issue and tie that rotten record around Sen. Allen’s neck.

Jarding and Mudcat have put their ideas for retaking the South from the Republicans in a book, “Foxes in the Hen House: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run ‘em Out,” which should be of interest to every liberal politician who yearns to see red turn to blue on the map of the old Confederacy and beyond.

Here are some other elements of the Jarding and Mudcat prescription for the comeback of the Democratic Party in the South:

Lose “the wuss factor” and bone up on the culture of country people — even if it means forgetting about the women’s studies professors and the gay-rights activists. (They’ll vote for Democrats regardless, the authors argue.)

Instead, concentrate on broadening the base: Show rural people in the South and the heartland that, while you may not personally play the banjo, hunt deer or go to NASCAR races, you appreciate that they do.

If urban areas tend to go Democrat and suburban/exurban areas go Republican, “The swing vote is what’s left, and it lives in rural America,” Saunders says. “These people have been voting Republican, but they’re not really Republicans, and we need to show ‘em why.”

Democrats need to reframe the debate and start talking about what rural Americans really worry about, he says.

“It’s unbelievable that Democrats can’t figure out that what we’re really worried about is health care and jobs, that Mama’s got to get a second job and how we’re getting Junior to the dentist.

It all rings true. However, I think the GOP’s weakest link with working class voters is in the wallet. We have six years of evidence now that every time a wage-earner votes for a Republican, he is voting against his own self-interest. Since 2001, when the GOP took control of the White House and the Congress, the only thing Republicans have done well is the efficiency with which they have transferred the resources of the have-nots into the vaults of Bush and Cheney’s cronies among the uber-wealthy.

In the Reagan era, voters were told that if they gave their money to the wealthy class, the moneyed elites would invest the money in jobs for the rest of us. It struck me as a bizarre theory from the start. Now we know that in practice the corporate class has taken that money and invested in jobs for low-wage workers overseas. Republicans used to call this policy “trickle-down economics.” But, as we now know, the flow of money is more of a “torrent” than a “trickle” and it flows up not down.

In order to flip working class voters to the Democratic Party, they must be convinced that the Democrats’ economic policies are better for them personally than the Republican policies. And by the way, what is more important, your personal prosperity or your fear of, say, gay people.

As Mudcat puts it: “To me, as far as gays are concerned … what’s two queer guys gettin’ married got to do with me losing my job?”

While the political incorrectness of this statement may be off-putting to some, as a gay Southern-raised white guy, I think it is dead on. It is high time Democratic pols reminded these voters about their own priorities, and the only way to do it is in their own language.