You go back even earlier than Lee Atwater. Here is what Kevin Philips a Nixon strategist who popularized the term "Southern Strategy" said about it. [rquoter]From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[1][/rquoter] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Southern_strategy As I said earlier this is an insult to history to claim that Republicans are clean on race.
Doesn't matter to him. As far as he is concerned it was the Republicans who emancipated slaves and was on the winning side of the civil war. Therefore Republicans are the true heroes today.
Republicans appear ready to bend the knee to the Union in South Carolina. http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/22/politics/lindsey-graham-confederate-flag-come-down/index.html
Indeed. That was the objective of Nixon's so-called "Southern Strategy" whose objective was to peel away the support of southern whites. Through the use of racially coded messaging such as "Law and Order", the Republican party advanced the idea that less qualified and unworthy blacks were getting preferential treatment by the government at the expense of whites. Now what this strategy managed to accomplish is to migrate the Dixiecrats that were in the Democratic party over to the Republican party where they now form the basis of the Tea Party movement. It also explains why there is dismal support amongst African-Americans for the Republican party because of the racist messaging and actions that have emanated from it since the 1970's.
50 years after the Democrats raised the Confederate flag in SC, a GOP female Indian governor takes it down
Yeah, all those Democrats who switched parties and ran on segregationist platforms... oh wait... Also, The Civil Rights Act had far more support from the GOP than the Dems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#By_party
^This, it doesn't matter what party you are in. "Conservatives" enslaved Africans, "Progressive" people thought it was uncivilized and wanted it abolished.
I agree, but the GOP didn't start this crap. They are expected to answer for every wackjob shooter despite having nothing to do with them.
This is Lee Atwater being interviewed while working for Ronald Reagan as a campaign consultant. He's only being this honest because the interview was supposed to be anonymous. So Commodore you can now no longer pretend that you don't know.
"Conservatives" who are now apart of the GOP started this crap. The guy who inspired the idiot who shot these people leads a white supremacist group called "Council of CONSERVATIVE Citizens".
Not in the South. In the 1960s, the Republican party was mostly a northeastern based, somewhat elitist party that had very little traction in the south. The southern Dems were very wary of that bill because they knew that its passage would antagonize their voting constituencies. Also, at that time, there were actual liberal and moderate Republicans (not the case today) who were instrumental in the passage of the Civil & Voting Rights bills. But that Republican party no longer exists thanks to the efforts of Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan. Indeed, Nixon pursued a two prong strategy that targeted the animosity of southern whites toward civil rights and the disdain of northern blue-collar white male workers toward the antiwar demonstrators. It worked to perfection in the South because it legitimized the bigotry many whites had for African-Americans. The actions of the Republican party since then have institutionalized this political divide with its emphasis on "states rights" which is a code word for rolling back the legal protections African-Americans received under these laws. African-American (and Hispanic) voters understand this history which is why they are so solidly Democratic. You really need to open up a history book and stop getting your information from Rush Limbaugh.
Correct on both counts given that Lee Atwater: had extensive experience as a campaign consultant in South Carolina worked as a high level campaign consultant in the Reagan administration worked as a campaign manager for Bush during the '88 campaign was appointed Chairman of the RNC I don't know, do you consider the chairman of the Republican National Committee highly representative of the Republican party?
Not as long as he does not use this as an opportunity to proudly present himself as a black racist, yet again.
This isn't something for which the Republicans should or need to answer. If anything the Council of Conservative Citizens has more responsibility in what happened than the Republican party. However, because of the racial "box" the party has placed itself in, the current Republican candidates for POTUS really have had to temper their public remarks on what happened because of the fear of offending their voter base in South Carolina. And that says a lot about the current state of the Republican party.
