Leadership Quote by Sonny Perdue

Calling the South a "great driving destination" is less about romance than routing: it casts the region as consumable in segments, experienced through windshields, exits, and itineraries. Sonny Perdue, a politician fluent in economic-development language, frames the South as a product with multiple SKUs - "heritage, cultural and many other types of tourism" - a tidy list that sounds inclusive while staying strategically vague. The sentence works because it sells without naming what, exactly, is being sold.

"Heritage" is the loaded word. In Southern politics and tourism, it can signal everything from Civil War memory to plantation weddings to local foodways, depending on the audience. Perdue’s phrasing keeps that ambiguity intact, letting listeners project the version of the South they’re comfortable paying for. "Cultural" softens the pitch further, implying music, festivals, cuisine, crafts - an aesthetic experience rather than a moral reckoning. By bundling "heritage" with "many other types", the quote dilutes controversy through abundance.

The subtext is classic boosterism: tourism as a jobs program that doesn’t require ideological consensus. Driving tourism, in particular, nods to the South’s geography and infrastructure - interstates, small towns, scenic byways - and to a middle-class traveler seeking affordable, domestic escape. It’s a pitch built for chambers of commerce and state marketing campaigns, where the goal is to convert history into revenue while keeping the sharp edges of that history just out of frame.