Joan Walsh at salon.com has an excellent analytical article about the Republican/FoxNews (they are the same thing) 50-state "southern strategy": Salon.com: Fox News' 50-state Southern strategy
It dovetails with some thoughts I've had lately. The tea baggers sound like George Wallace to me and the Republicans now fully claim the hateful heritage of racism, with an additional Islamophobia and hatred of Hispanics. You better be really, really white to avoid their wrath.
Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state "Southern strategy," the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn't merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites
(Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon). Now Fox is using the election of our first black president to scare (mainly older) white people in all 50 states that, again, the Democratic Party is run by corrupt black people trying to give blacks advantages over whites (MSNBC's Rachel Maddow laid out this history last week).
Salon.com: Fox News' 50-state Southern strategy
Ms. Walsh points to the last four big stories on FoxNews to support her thesis:
- Van Jones
- Acorn
- New Black Panthers
- Shirley Sherrod
See Salon.com: Fox News' 50-state Southern strategy
Excellent article, well worth reading in its entirety.
I want to look at a bit of history because not everyone remembers the evil that George Wallace was. I was 13 when he got 13% of the vote nationally and won several southern states in 1968. I recall he received enough "blue-collar" white votes in Michigan to throw the election to Nixon. That's what I remember, although I'm not sure it was ever proven.
Some history about the man who proclaimed "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in his 1963 innauguration speech as Governor of Alabama.
In September 1963, Wallace ordered state police to Huntsville, Mobile, Tuskegee and Birmingham to prevent public schools from opening, following a federal court order to integrate Alabama schools. Helmeted and heavily armed state police and state National Guard units kept students and faculty from entering schools. Following civil disturbances resulting in at least one death, President Kennedy again nationalized the Guard and saw the schools integrated.
snip
In 1964, Wallace campaigned as a Democratic candidate for president and attempted to explain himself outside the south. He said he opposed the growing powers of the federal government, especially the courts and the bureaucracy, which he held up to ridicule. He pointed out that federal judges and bureaucrats had been elected by no one and were increasingly usurping powers of the individuals and states. He portrayed them as underworked self-important "pointy-headed" intellectuals who had their heads in the clouds and their lunches in their trademark attache cases.
snip
In 1968, he ran for president on his own American Independent Party ticket, winning nearly 10 million votes, about 13 percent of the total, in a campaign in which he vilified blacks, students and people who called for an end to the war in Vietnam. He carried five Southern states and won 46 electoral votes.
WaPo: Former Ala. Gov. George C. Wallace Dies
A 1968 Wallace ad about busing and integration:
He was a racist who appealed to poor and working class whites. They did not have much, but they were white, and Wallace provided them people to hate (or validated their own hatreds). Their identity was whiteness. To validate that identity, they needed non-white enemies, the other, who they could blame, along with educated folks, "pointy-headed" intellectuals." Sound familiar? It does to me.
Remember that Pat Buchanan has compared the Tea Partiers to "George Wallace voters," and bragged that he won them over to Nixon. Buchanan and Ailes are trying to do it again, and having a black Democrat in the White House makes them think it will be even easier this time.
Salon.com: Fox News' 50-state Southern strategy
So Nixon pursued the the southern strategy and changed the Party of Lincoln into the Party of George Wallace, albeit cleaned up a little bit. As time went on, the Republicans learned to do dog whistles.
Lee Atwater, a key Republican campaign strategist of the 1980s, told truth in an interview that was published after his death:
As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to Political Scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of this interview was printed in Lamis' book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. Bob Herbert reported on the interview in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times. Atwater talked about the GOP's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: 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."[6][7]
wikepedia, Lee Atwater
Roger Ailes comes from that world: he is president of Fox News Channel and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group, and was a media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.
In 1987 and 1988, Ailes was credited (along with Lee Atwater) with guiding George H. W. Bush to victory in the Republican primaries, and the later come-from-behind victory over Michael Dukakis. Ailes scripted and (with Sig Rogich) produced the "Revolving Door" ad [Willie Horton], as well as all of Bush's broadcast spots in the primary and general-election campaigns.
Wikepedia, Roger Ailes
I hear and see tea partiers and I hear and see George Wallace and his racist voters. I see the hate. Ignorant white folks thinking that their skin color makes them superior.
I'm optimistic, though, in the face of FoxNews and the hatred. Since the time of George Wallace, many white people have made progress. Many whites have rejected hatred, or at least tried to do so.
As the President said today:
"There are still inequalities out there. There's still discrimination out there," Obama said. "But we've made progress."
Obama talks race, pop culture on 'The View'
I agree with Ms. Walsh, but we have to work to make this optimism become real at the ballot box:
There are too many people of every race who are genuinely not racist, or open to naked racial appeals. I truly believe the vast majority of American voters will judge Obama on his accomplishments or lack thereof in 2012, not the color of his skin. But older white voters scared by social change are a small but reliable base for Ailes and Buchanan to rely on.
Salon.com: Fox News' 50-state Southern strategy
The election this fall is a turning point. Americans have a choice between the hatred spewed out by the Republican Party, a racist and xenophobic party [I guess I'm a pointy-headed intellectional] that uses a faux populism based on hatred of those who are not white to get votes. Or it can choose decency. Democrats ain't perfect, that's for sure, but their hearts are not full of race hate. It matters.
Update I: I had two requests to include this in the comments. Great appearance by Joan Walsh: