Must read of the day: "The Republican Party is only a viable entity because of Southern racism."
Please read the whole article by Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate.com, but here is the heart of it.
The GOP would simply cease to have any power at all if not for its' appeal to rural voters in the deep south and the unpopulated mid-west. I don't want to quote too much of the material above, so I am strongly suggesting that you read the whole article linked above.I’ve spent some time putting “truth” claims and false equivalencies in perspective because I want to test the theory that there is one truth in political discourse that the media has almost entirely failed to recognize or fears to utter, one at the heart of presidential campaign reporting: The Republican Party is an institutionally, structurally racist entity. It’s the veritable elephant in the room of campaign coverage.No, I’m not saying all Republicans are racist. I’m saying that as a party, ever since Goldwater and Nixon concocted the benighted, openly racist “Southern Strategy” in the ’60s, the Republican Party has profited from overt and covert racism.
~snip~
Which means in practice that the GOP starts out every presidential election with (depending on census changes in electoral vote numbers) some 100 electoral votes, more than a third of the way to the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.
Is it an accident that these 100 votes come from the core states of the Old Confederacy—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina?
Looked at another way, as things stand, there would be no presidential "race" at the moment if it weren't for those ex-confederate states—even if they split their votes. Mitt Romney would have little or no chance of winning and might as well quit the race now. Nor would the GOP have much chance of re-taking the Senate or even winning the House again. They would be dead as a political party if not for the legacy of racism. I think that's a fact. Do you think it's "he said/she said"?
A few more thoughts below the fold.
There is a reason why Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney has ZERO support among African Americans. It is because Republicans are hostile to African Americans. There is a reason why Obama is winning the Latino vote by 50+%. It is because Republicans are hostile to Latinos. There is a reason why Republicans are trying their damndest to make it harder for minorities to vote in states that Republicans control. There is a reason why Confederate States are solidly Republican. There is a reason why Republican media hacks like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are trying to make a big deal about a video from 2007 of Obama consorting with other black people. It's because back in the 60's the GOP decided to be the anti-brown people party and they have stuck with that formula ever since. They decided they will oppose civil rights reforms, they would demonize minorities and liberals and they would pander to religious rural white people, and that worked in the 1960's, but in 2012, not so much. So it becomes a conspiracy, the polls are skewed, the jobs numbers are fake, evolution is fake, climate change is fake, and the "War of Northern Aggression" was about state's rights, not slavery. Sure, riiight.
The Republican party, for the past 50 years, has had a strategy of rich white people telling poor white people to blame poor brown people for their economic woes. From Reagan's "Welfare Queens" to today's references to Obama as the "Food stamp President". 50 f**king years. It's not like they just started doing this.
There is a reason why Republicans are doing horribly with everyone who isn't a white male. Yes, Republicans, "You built that." To ignore the GOP's ongoing Southern Strategy is to ignore exactly what it is that historically has made the modern GOP what they are today. Without it's Confederate bloc of Deep Southern states this election would be already over for the GOP, and THAT is just one of many reasons why the Republican party badly deserves defeat in November.
