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blue bits. red rocks.
Thursday 6 August 2009

For the past forty years or so, any Republican strategist who’s been sufficiently eager to win points for candor to acknowledge how important the white racist vote has been to the GOP in its vote-getting efforts has been quick to add that it’s just politics and that, sure, it’s sort of embarrassing, but for a while it was necessary because of the way the Democrats had cheated in FDR’s day by unfairly getting so many people to favor them just because they’d gone and created a halfway livable society. But now that people had had the chance to get a taste of Republican rule and see how swell their ideas were, they’d be able to drop the “welfare queen in a Cadillac” crap from their playbook and win on their own virtues. That never work out too well. The classic Republican campaigner since Nixon may not be the magical elf Reagan or his spiritual heir Li’l War President, but Li’l’s babbling daddy, who ran the ugliest, most content-free campaign in modern memory in 1988, then spent at least three and a half years entertaining reporters by telling them how, now that everyone had the chance to see what a dandy president he was and how much they loved him, he’d be able to run a proper, dignified re-election campaign in 1992, one that would make it easier for his future hagiographers to point to as an example of what was best about him and his party. Whereupon the queasy-making old bastard tumbled from his perch in the poles, had a public meltdown, and wound up needlessly elevating Larry King’s blood pressure with wild tales about how we just didn’t know for sure that Bill Clinton hadn’t peddled state secrets to the KGB when he went to Moscow on a school trip. And who knows? Maybe the only reason that Bush couldn’t save himself that year was that he’d recklessly used up all his race-based ammunition four years earlier. The first time you pull Willie Horton out of the box, it’s shocking; try it a second time and the desperation is so evident that it just looks as if the Wizard of Oz’s diaper needs changing; people just feel sorry for you. Phil Nugent

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