What Dean meant

I’ve been toying on and off with commenting on the Dean/flag flap lately after seeing Zell “Why am I not a Republican” Miller on the Meet the Press this weekend deliberately misconstruing Dean’s (admittedly “dangerous”) statements about how he wants the votes of people who have confederate flags in their pickup trucks.
Miller responded as though Dean were using this segment of the population as a stand-in for the entire South. Putting aside Miller’s own checkered political history regarding the confederate battle flag, he probably knew that this was not what Dean was saying at all. When attacked about this in the debate last night, apparently Dean stood his ground (refused to apologize) and tried to explain that he is making a class/poverty-related point, and that the flag is popular in the South because the Republicans have employed a deliberate strategy of dividing poor people by race in that region.
Having recently enjoyed reading my way through John Scalzi’s very amusing series of posts about the Confederate “heritage” issues and the battle flag, I was wondering what his take on this issue might be. I was pleased to see that his analysis of the situation very closely matches my own.