Last Sunday Gregory Stanford penned an eminently reasonable column arguing that, for all its rhetoric, the Republican Party can't reach out to minorities. Why?
Trouble is, ill will toward people of color is central to Republicanism - that is, it pleases the party's base.
The Brawler suspects that few dispassionate observers of the American political scene (and, no, that doesn't include Michael Barone) would disagree with the claim that the Republican base consists of more than a few white folks who have trouble with colored folks.
Jessica McBride -- she who declared, apropos of Michael McGee's reelection, that "thugs vote for a thug" -- denounced the column in her inimitable droning fashion.
She concluded thusly:
So here is my question for Greg Stanford:
What's your evidence that the Republican Party is racist?
I dunno, how about this?
Listen to the late Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the evolution of the G.O.P.'s Southern strategy:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
"And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.' "
Atwater, of course, was something of a guru to George W. back when Atwater was running Poppy's campaign, which included the totally nonracist Willie Horton ad.
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