Grab a tiny violin and give it to Sen. Rand Paul,
because:
Rand Paul defended the appearance he made at Howard University last week, saying he wasn't trying to teach black students about their own history and that the "left wing media" had misrepresented his speech.
At a breakfast held Wednesday by the Christian Science Monitor, Paul said it was "unfair" how the media had portrayed the speech, which was by and large appreciated by the students in attendance — even if they said they still would never become Republicans.
I'm guessing Paul is referring to coverage like
this, which took him to task for falsely claiming that he had never wavered in his support for the Civil Rights Act. But as you'll see below the fold, he also attacked people who said he had downplayed the southern strategy by saying they overestimate its importance.
According to Paul's woe-is-me whine:
"I was completely blasted by some of the left-wing for being out of touch and knowing nothing about the southern strategy and that's why African-Americans became Democrats. Which is flat out wrong. Look at the facts," he said. Paul argued that the real shift in black voting habits had come in the 1930s.
"So for people to tell me the reason Republicans are hated is because of the southern strategy — it may have cemented the change, but the change did happen in the Great Depression," Paul said. "I said this in my speech and most people ignored it, but the change happened among whites and blacks. A lot of people switched their registration in the 1930s."
He continued: "You get to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, you've got 90 percent of African-Americans voting for LBJ, the southern strategy by most reports is after that, not before that. So it solidified, but it didn't cause the change. The people who write that are just factually wrong."
The thing that Paul ignores is that the southern strategy wasn't a Democratic plan to get more votes from African Americans—it was a Republican plan to pry white voters from the Democratic New Deal coalition.
So while it's true that African Americans voted heavily for FDR in 1936—71 percent of them did—you can't ignore the fact that so did 61 percent of the all voters. But by 1968, 85 percent of African Americans voted for Humphrey in a razor close election and in 1972, 87 percent of African Americans voted for McGovernor despite Nixon's landslide victory. Those numbers demonstrate the impact of the southern strategy that Paul thinks is no big deal.
And he thinks it's very unfair to hold it against Republicans:
"I think some of it's fair, some of it's unfair," Paul said of contemporary opinion on how the Republican party handled race in the latter half of the 20th century. "People have told me they think that the Willie Brown ad was racist, people have told me they think Reagan talking about welfare queens was racist," he said.
Oh, and it's also would probably be unfair to point out that Paul meant Willie Horton, not Willie Brown, who was mayor of San Francisco. After all, Republicans like attacking the Democratic Party for having "San Francisco values" as much they like claiming that it's "soft" on criminals like Horton.