The Myth of ‘the Southern Strategy’

[Pogo]

1.Having no way to hide the stain of their history the Democrats, doing what they do best, lie about the other side, as an attempt to mitigate and obfuscate the Democrat record.



We’ve all seen the inveterate ersatz liars, here on the board, claim that there was some sort of reversal of the two parties, the Republican Party, created to fight slavery, and the Democrats, assiduously striving to make certain that racism remains in America, switched views. Never happened.

^^ Merriam-Webster would like to borrow this post as an example of "Strawman fallacy".

The Republican Party "Southern Strategy" and the so-called "party shift/reversal" are two different things, so you're deliberately trying to cloud that issue, as befits your legacy here as Mendacious Mythologist of Miscreancy.

The Southern Strategy is a quantifiable, documentable plan articulated and re-articulated, most notably by its strategist and party chair Lee Atwater, and by a subsequent party chair who not only re-acknowledged it but apologized for it.

Atwater (1981): "You start out in 1954 by saying, “******, ******, ******.” By 1968 you can’t say “******”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “******, ******.”

Ken Mehlman (2005): "By the ‘70s and into the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.’”

Well OK, he at least acknowledged it, if not apologized.

But that's a whole different thing from a "party reversal", isn't it. And of course you know this, after all where would you be as a purveyor of fine bullshit if you didn't have the actual history in hand to pervert. That is after all where lying comes in.


The "party reversal" was way earlier. And Mehlman's citation of the "'70s and '80s" is half a century off; the black vote has been in the Democratic camp since the 1930s. To explain that we go back a few more decades.

First of all, "party switch" is another deliberate mendacity. It implies something simply "switches" like the light you flip on when you enter a room. This evolution took decades but it absolutely did happen. So we'll not be using the term "switch", thank you very little.

At the turn of the (19th > 20th) century the directions of the Duopoly parties were evolving. The Republican Party, which had already experienced schisms between its radical Liberals and more conservative elements, began taking on the interests of the wealthy, the railroads, the corporations, and thus moving away from the middle class. The Democrats simultaneously courted labor, immigrants and minorities, absorbing the Populist Party and movement after some experimentation with "fusion" parties. These were exemplified by the two Williams, McKinley and Jennings Bryan, respectively. There were even bumps in the road, when McKinley was assassinated and T Roosevelt was thrust into the Presidency. Roosevelt represented the more Liberal element and sympathized with the Progressive movement, and he wasn't in the Republican script. So after his successor Taft demonstrated a move back to the corporate-conservative-wealthy element, Roosevelt opposed him, ran against him for the 1912 nomination, and in fact dominated the primaries.

But when the convention came the Party ignored Roosevelt's wins and tapped the incumbent Taft as the more representative of the way the party wanted to go. Roosevelt then took his delegates and formed his own party, popularly called the Bull Moose party, ran in the 1912 election and again easily beat Taft. But that schism wasn't enough to combat the more unified Democrats, who got Woodrow Wilson into office with under 42% of the popular vote.

After that it was all conservative wealthy upper-class rhetoric for the Republicans while the Democrats acquired loyal constituencies of labor, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and by the 1930s, blacks. THERE is your party "reversal", comprising approximately forty years.

That's got nothing to do with "1968" in Atwater's reference, which may be construed as the beginning of the Southern Strategy. That year Richard Nixon ran as the "law and order" candidate, a euphemism designed to cover both "the scary black people" and "the scary demonstrating hippies". Ultraconservative George Wallace, who had offered to switch parties four years earlier to be Barry Goldwater's running mate, ran for POTUS with an ultra-right fringe conservative party called the American Independent Party, and Strom Thurmond had already done the unthinkable and switched parties in 1964, finally acknowledging that his segregationist agenda was going nowhere with the Democrats, who had just passed the Civil Rights Act over his impassioned resistance, followed over the years by other old-line ultraconservative Southern Democrats (e.g. Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Trent Lott, eventually the infamous David Duke).

Then in 1980 Ronald Reagan literally began his campaign in Philadelphia -- not the one in Pennsylvania but the one in Mississippi where civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwermer were all murdered by Ku Klux Klan --- peppering his speech with bite-size appetizers about "states rights", the same phrase used by Wallace and Thurmond, the same phrase incessantly invoked by the Lost Cause Cult, the same ideal the Democrats stood for at the time of the Civil War, when Democrats were the conservatives and the upstart Republicans were, by virtue of advocating Abolition, the Liberals.

That would change by the end of the century, as already explained.

LEARN the above, as there will be a quiz. Your thread is now kaputulated. That will be $12.78 in labor plus $3000 in fines for lying.


/thread

Atwater also said, in that same interview, that his generation of Southerns, ie the Baby Boomers, were not racist.


You believe that as much as you believe in the southern strategy? Or you going to pick and choose?

It's a quote. Prove it isn't.

Besides which, nothing IN the quote suggests that strategy is targeting "baby boomers". Far from it. Nice try, absence of cigar.

Fun fact: Lee Atwater was from Atlanta. Birthplace of the Klan. What they both have in common: targeting racists for personal gain, using principles in which the targeter didn't even necessarily believe in. Neither had any principles beyond "what's in it for me".

1. Sure, it's a quote. Years after the fact. And with no evidence that that view was ever used for campaigning or policy.

Good CHRIST.

***ALL*** quotes are after the fact. That's what makes them QUOTES.

Holy SHIT it's dense in here.

"No evidence it was used for campaigning or policy"?????? He was the FUCKING BUSH CAMPAIGN MANAGER and the Deputy Campaign Manager for Reagan. Ever heard of Willie Horton?

>> Bush campaign strategist Lee Atwater knew talking about Horton could be devastating to the Democratic nominee.

"Lee knew that it was powerful. Lee knew that it fit a liberal stereotype that would make a larger point about Dukakis," Bush deputy campaign manager Ed Rogers said in the CNN documentary "Race for The White House: George H.W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis."
"Lee also knew that he could be radioactive with Bush. That if it weren't handled right, Bush wouldn't use it. Bush would declare it off-limits."

After the independent group's ad aired, Bush's campaign later produced a related spot called "Revolving Door" that showed convicts walking in and out of prison as the narrator explained Dukakis' liberal positions on issues like mandatory sentencing for drug dealers without showing or mentioning Horton by name. << -- the 30-year-old Willie Horton ad

There's your "no evidence". Go ahead, deny it's sitting right there on the page. Have fun.

2. So, do you believe Atwater's qoute that the South stopped being racist, with the Baby Boom generation? Or is he only an Authority when it suits you?

It's IRRELEVANT to the question of the existence of a strategy to milk that element.

Once AGAIN ---- in 1968, which is where he dates the beginning of said strategy, baby boomers were just barely old enough to vote. The voting population as a whole was older than that, and that was where the numbers were.

 

[Correll]

1.Having no way to hide the stain of their history the Democrats, doing what they do best, lie about the other side, as an attempt to mitigate and obfuscate the Democrat record.



We’ve all seen the inveterate ersatz liars, here on the board, claim that there was some sort of reversal of the two parties, the Republican Party, created to fight slavery, and the Democrats, assiduously striving to make certain that racism remains in America, switched views. Never happened.

^^ Merriam-Webster would like to borrow this post as an example of "Strawman fallacy".

The Republican Party "Southern Strategy" and the so-called "party shift/reversal" are two different things, so you're deliberately trying to cloud that issue, as befits your legacy here as Mendacious Mythologist of Miscreancy.

The Southern Strategy is a quantifiable, documentable plan articulated and re-articulated, most notably by its strategist and party chair Lee Atwater, and by a subsequent party chair who not only re-acknowledged it but apologized for it.

Atwater (1981): "You start out in 1954 by saying, “******, ******, ******.” By 1968 you can’t say “******”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “******, ******.”

Ken Mehlman (2005): "By the ‘70s and into the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.’”

Well OK, he at least acknowledged it, if not apologized.

But that's a whole different thing from a "party reversal", isn't it. And of course you know this, after all where would you be as a purveyor of fine bullshit if you didn't have the actual history in hand to pervert. That is after all where lying comes in.


The "party reversal" was way earlier. And Mehlman's citation of the "'70s and '80s" is half a century off; the black vote has been in the Democratic camp since the 1930s. To explain that we go back a few more decades.

First of all, "party switch" is another deliberate mendacity. It implies something simply "switches" like the light you flip on when you enter a room. This evolution took decades but it absolutely did happen. So we'll not be using the term "switch", thank you very little.

At the turn of the (19th > 20th) century the directions of the Duopoly parties were evolving. The Republican Party, which had already experienced schisms between its radical Liberals and more conservative elements, began taking on the interests of the wealthy, the railroads, the corporations, and thus moving away from the middle class. The Democrats simultaneously courted labor, immigrants and minorities, absorbing the Populist Party and movement after some experimentation with "fusion" parties. These were exemplified by the two Williams, McKinley and Jennings Bryan, respectively. There were even bumps in the road, when McKinley was assassinated and T Roosevelt was thrust into the Presidency. Roosevelt represented the more Liberal element and sympathized with the Progressive movement, and he wasn't in the Republican script. So after his successor Taft demonstrated a move back to the corporate-conservative-wealthy element, Roosevelt opposed him, ran against him for the 1912 nomination, and in fact dominated the primaries.

But when the convention came the Party ignored Roosevelt's wins and tapped the incumbent Taft as the more representative of the way the party wanted to go. Roosevelt then took his delegates and formed his own party, popularly called the Bull Moose party, ran in the 1912 election and again easily beat Taft. But that schism wasn't enough to combat the more unified Democrats, who got Woodrow Wilson into office with under 42% of the popular vote.

After that it was all conservative wealthy upper-class rhetoric for the Republicans while the Democrats acquired loyal constituencies of labor, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and by the 1930s, blacks. THERE is your party "reversal", comprising approximately forty years.

That's got nothing to do with "1968" in Atwater's reference, which may be construed as the beginning of the Southern Strategy. That year Richard Nixon ran as the "law and order" candidate, a euphemism designed to cover both "the scary black people" and "the scary demonstrating hippies". Ultraconservative George Wallace, who had offered to switch parties four years earlier to be Barry Goldwater's running mate, ran for POTUS with an ultra-right fringe conservative party called the American Independent Party, and Strom Thurmond had already done the unthinkable and switched parties in 1964, finally acknowledging that his segregationist agenda was going nowhere with the Democrats, who had just passed the Civil Rights Act over his impassioned resistance, followed over the years by other old-line ultraconservative Southern Democrats (e.g. Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Trent Lott, eventually the infamous David Duke).

Then in 1980 Ronald Reagan literally began his campaign in Philadelphia -- not the one in Pennsylvania but the one in Mississippi where civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwermer were all murdered by Ku Klux Klan --- peppering his speech with bite-size appetizers about "states rights", the same phrase used by Wallace and Thurmond, the same phrase incessantly invoked by the Lost Cause Cult, the same ideal the Democrats stood for at the time of the Civil War, when Democrats were the conservatives and the upstart Republicans were, by virtue of advocating Abolition, the Liberals.

That would change by the end of the century, as already explained.

LEARN the above, as there will be a quiz. Your thread is now kaputulated. That will be $12.78 in labor plus $3000 in fines for lying.


/thread

Atwater also said, in that same interview, that his generation of Southerns, ie the Baby Boomers, were not racist.


You believe that as much as you believe in the southern strategy? Or you going to pick and choose?

It's a quote. Prove it isn't.

Besides which, nothing IN the quote suggests that strategy is targeting "baby boomers". Far from it. Nice try, absence of cigar.

Fun fact: Lee Atwater was from Atlanta. Birthplace of the Klan. What they both have in common: targeting racists for personal gain, using principles in which the targeter didn't even necessarily believe in. Neither had any principles beyond "what's in it for me".

1. Sure, it's a quote. Years after the fact. And with no evidence that that view was ever used for campaigning or policy.

Good CHRIST.

***ALL*** quotes are after the fact. That's what makes them QUOTES.

Holy SHIT it's dense in here.

"No evidence it was used for campaigning or policy"?????? He was the FUCKING BUSH CAMPAIGN MANAGER and the Deputy Campaign Manager for Reagan. Ever heard of Willie Horton?

>> Bush campaign strategist Lee Atwater knew talking about Horton could be devastating to the Democratic nominee.

"Lee knew that it was powerful. Lee knew that it fit a liberal stereotype that would make a larger point about Dukakis," Bush deputy campaign manager Ed Rogers said in the CNN documentary "Race for The White House: George H.W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis."
"Lee also knew that he could be radioactive with Bush. That if it weren't handled right, Bush wouldn't use it. Bush would declare it off-limits."

After the independent group's ad aired, Bush's campaign later produced a related spot called "Revolving Door" that showed convicts walking in and out of prison as the narrator explained Dukakis' liberal positions on issues like mandatory sentencing for drug dealers without showing or mentioning Horton by name. << -- the 30-year-old Willie Horton ad

There's your "no evidence". Go ahead, deny it's sitting right there on the page. Have fun.

2. So, do you believe Atwater's qoute that the South stopped being racist, with the Baby Boom generation? Or is he only an Authority when it suits you?

It's IRRELEVANT to the question of the existence of a strategy to milk that element.

Once AGAIN ---- in 1968, which is where he dates the beginning of said strategy, baby boomers were just barely old enough to vote. The voting population as a whole was older than that, and that was where the numbers were.

1. The Horton rapes showed, truthfully that Dukakis was soft on crime to the detriment of his people. That was a valid policy issue. Your assumption that is was about race, says more about you, than it does about Bush.


2. DO YOU BELIEVE ATWATER THAT THE SOUTH STOPPED BEING RACIST, WITH THE BABY BOOM GENERATION?

 

[Wyatt earp]

^^ Merriam-Webster would like to borrow this post as an example of "Strawman fallacy".

The Republican Party "Southern Strategy" and the so-called "party shift/reversal" are two different things, so you're deliberately trying to cloud that issue, as befits your legacy here as Mendacious Mythologist of Miscreancy.

The Southern Strategy is a quantifiable, documentable plan articulated and re-articulated, most notably by its strategist and party chair Lee Atwater, and by a subsequent party chair who not only re-acknowledged it but apologized for it.

Atwater (1981): "You start out in 1954 by saying, “******, ******, ******.” By 1968 you can’t say “******”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “******, ******.”

Ken Mehlman (2005): "By the ‘70s and into the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.’”

Well OK, he at least acknowledged it, if not apologized.

But that's a whole different thing from a "party reversal", isn't it. And of course you know this, after all where would you be as a purveyor of fine bullshit if you didn't have the actual history in hand to pervert. That is after all where lying comes in.


The "party reversal" was way earlier. And Mehlman's citation of the "'70s and '80s" is half a century off; the black vote has been in the Democratic camp since the 1930s. To explain that we go back a few more decades.

First of all, "party switch" is another deliberate mendacity. It implies something simply "switches" like the light you flip on when you enter a room. This evolution took decades but it absolutely did happen. So we'll not be using the term "switch", thank you very little.

At the turn of the (19th > 20th) century the directions of the Duopoly parties were evolving. The Republican Party, which had already experienced schisms between its radical Liberals and more conservative elements, began taking on the interests of the wealthy, the railroads, the corporations, and thus moving away from the middle class. The Democrats simultaneously courted labor, immigrants and minorities, absorbing the Populist Party and movement after some experimentation with "fusion" parties. These were exemplified by the two Williams, McKinley and Jennings Bryan, respectively. There were even bumps in the road, when McKinley was assassinated and T Roosevelt was thrust into the Presidency. Roosevelt represented the more Liberal element and sympathized with the Progressive movement, and he wasn't in the Republican script. So after his successor Taft demonstrated a move back to the corporate-conservative-wealthy element, Roosevelt opposed him, ran against him for the 1912 nomination, and in fact dominated the primaries.

But when the convention came the Party ignored Roosevelt's wins and tapped the incumbent Taft as the more representative of the way the party wanted to go. Roosevelt then took his delegates and formed his own party, popularly called the Bull Moose party, ran in the 1912 election and again easily beat Taft. But that schism wasn't enough to combat the more unified Democrats, who got Woodrow Wilson into office with under 42% of the popular vote.

After that it was all conservative wealthy upper-class rhetoric for the Republicans while the Democrats acquired loyal constituencies of labor, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and by the 1930s, blacks. THERE is your party "reversal", comprising approximately forty years.

That's got nothing to do with "1968" in Atwater's reference, which may be construed as the beginning of the Southern Strategy. That year Richard Nixon ran as the "law and order" candidate, a euphemism designed to cover both "the scary black people" and "the scary demonstrating hippies". Ultraconservative George Wallace, who had offered to switch parties four years earlier to be Barry Goldwater's running mate, ran for POTUS with an ultra-right fringe conservative party called the American Independent Party, and Strom Thurmond had already done the unthinkable and switched parties in 1964, finally acknowledging that his segregationist agenda was going nowhere with the Democrats, who had just passed the Civil Rights Act over his impassioned resistance, followed over the years by other old-line ultraconservative Southern Democrats (e.g. Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Trent Lott, eventually the infamous David Duke).

Then in 1980 Ronald Reagan literally began his campaign in Philadelphia -- not the one in Pennsylvania but the one in Mississippi where civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwermer were all murdered by Ku Klux Klan --- peppering his speech with bite-size appetizers about "states rights", the same phrase used by Wallace and Thurmond, the same phrase incessantly invoked by the Lost Cause Cult, the same ideal the Democrats stood for at the time of the Civil War, when Democrats were the conservatives and the upstart Republicans were, by virtue of advocating Abolition, the Liberals.

That would change by the end of the century, as already explained.

LEARN the above, as there will be a quiz. Your thread is now kaputulated. That will be $12.78 in labor plus $3000 in fines for lying.


/thread

Atwater also said, in that same interview, that his generation of Southerns, ie the Baby Boomers, were not racist.


You believe that as much as you believe in the southern strategy? Or you going to pick and choose?

It's a quote. Prove it isn't.

Besides which, nothing IN the quote suggests that strategy is targeting "baby boomers". Far from it. Nice try, absence of cigar.

Fun fact: Lee Atwater was from Atlanta. Birthplace of the Klan. What they both have in common: targeting racists for personal gain, using principles in which the targeter didn't even necessarily believe in. Neither had any principles beyond "what's in it for me".

1. Sure, it's a quote. Years after the fact. And with no evidence that that view was ever used for campaigning or policy.

Good CHRIST.

***ALL*** quotes are after the fact. That's what makes them QUOTES.

Holy SHIT it's dense in here.

"No evidence it was used for campaigning or policy"?????? He was the FUCKING BUSH CAMPAIGN MANAGER and the Deputy Campaign Manager for Reagan. Ever heard of Willie Horton?

>> Bush campaign strategist Lee Atwater knew talking about Horton could be devastating to the Democratic nominee.

"Lee knew that it was powerful. Lee knew that it fit a liberal stereotype that would make a larger point about Dukakis," Bush deputy campaign manager Ed Rogers said in the CNN documentary "Race for The White House: George H.W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis."
"Lee also knew that he could be radioactive with Bush. That if it weren't handled right, Bush wouldn't use it. Bush would declare it off-limits."

After the independent group's ad aired, Bush's campaign later produced a related spot called "Revolving Door" that showed convicts walking in and out of prison as the narrator explained Dukakis' liberal positions on issues like mandatory sentencing for drug dealers without showing or mentioning Horton by name. << -- the 30-year-old Willie Horton ad

There's your "no evidence". Go ahead, deny it's sitting right there on the page. Have fun.

2. So, do you believe Atwater's qoute that the South stopped being racist, with the Baby Boom generation? Or is he only an Authority when it suits you?

It's IRRELEVANT to the question of the existence of a strategy to milk that element.

Once AGAIN ---- in 1968, which is where he dates the beginning of said strategy, baby boomers were just barely old enough to vote. The voting population as a whole was older than that, and that was where the numbers were.

1. The Horton rapes showed, truthfully that Dukakis was soft on crime to the detriment of his people. That was a valid policy issue. Your assumption that is was about race, says more about you, than it does about Bush.


2. DO YOU BELIEVE ATWATER THAT THE SOUTH STOPPED BEING RACIST, WITH THE BABY BOOM GENERATION?

I do just like when I worked for a Japanese company for 10 years the younger Rednecks and younger japenese attitudes were not racist .

 

[Pogo]

^^ Merriam-Webster would like to borrow this post as an example of "Strawman fallacy".

The Republican Party "Southern Strategy" and the so-called "party shift/reversal" are two different things, so you're deliberately trying to cloud that issue, as befits your legacy here as Mendacious Mythologist of Miscreancy.

The Southern Strategy is a quantifiable, documentable plan articulated and re-articulated, most notably by its strategist and party chair Lee Atwater, and by a subsequent party chair who not only re-acknowledged it but apologized for it.

Atwater (1981): "You start out in 1954 by saying, “******, ******, ******.” By 1968 you can’t say “******”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “******, ******.”

Ken Mehlman (2005): "By the ‘70s and into the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.’”

Well OK, he at least acknowledged it, if not apologized.

But that's a whole different thing from a "party reversal", isn't it. And of course you know this, after all where would you be as a purveyor of fine bullshit if you didn't have the actual history in hand to pervert. That is after all where lying comes in.


The "party reversal" was way earlier. And Mehlman's citation of the "'70s and '80s" is half a century off; the black vote has been in the Democratic camp since the 1930s. To explain that we go back a few more decades.

First of all, "party switch" is another deliberate mendacity. It implies something simply "switches" like the light you flip on when you enter a room. This evolution took decades but it absolutely did happen. So we'll not be using the term "switch", thank you very little.

At the turn of the (19th > 20th) century the directions of the Duopoly parties were evolving. The Republican Party, which had already experienced schisms between its radical Liberals and more conservative elements, began taking on the interests of the wealthy, the railroads, the corporations, and thus moving away from the middle class. The Democrats simultaneously courted labor, immigrants and minorities, absorbing the Populist Party and movement after some experimentation with "fusion" parties. These were exemplified by the two Williams, McKinley and Jennings Bryan, respectively. There were even bumps in the road, when McKinley was assassinated and T Roosevelt was thrust into the Presidency. Roosevelt represented the more Liberal element and sympathized with the Progressive movement, and he wasn't in the Republican script. So after his successor Taft demonstrated a move back to the corporate-conservative-wealthy element, Roosevelt opposed him, ran against him for the 1912 nomination, and in fact dominated the primaries.

But when the convention came the Party ignored Roosevelt's wins and tapped the incumbent Taft as the more representative of the way the party wanted to go. Roosevelt then took his delegates and formed his own party, popularly called the Bull Moose party, ran in the 1912 election and again easily beat Taft. But that schism wasn't enough to combat the more unified Democrats, who got Woodrow Wilson into office with under 42% of the popular vote.

After that it was all conservative wealthy upper-class rhetoric for the Republicans while the Democrats acquired loyal constituencies of labor, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and by the 1930s, blacks. THERE is your party "reversal", comprising approximately forty years.

That's got nothing to do with "1968" in Atwater's reference, which may be construed as the beginning of the Southern Strategy. That year Richard Nixon ran as the "law and order" candidate, a euphemism designed to cover both "the scary black people" and "the scary demonstrating hippies". Ultraconservative George Wallace, who had offered to switch parties four years earlier to be Barry Goldwater's running mate, ran for POTUS with an ultra-right fringe conservative party called the American Independent Party, and Strom Thurmond had already done the unthinkable and switched parties in 1964, finally acknowledging that his segregationist agenda was going nowhere with the Democrats, who had just passed the Civil Rights Act over his impassioned resistance, followed over the years by other old-line ultraconservative Southern Democrats (e.g. Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Trent Lott, eventually the infamous David Duke).

Then in 1980 Ronald Reagan literally began his campaign in Philadelphia -- not the one in Pennsylvania but the one in Mississippi where civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwermer were all murdered by Ku Klux Klan --- peppering his speech with bite-size appetizers about "states rights", the same phrase used by Wallace and Thurmond, the same phrase incessantly invoked by the Lost Cause Cult, the same ideal the Democrats stood for at the time of the Civil War, when Democrats were the conservatives and the upstart Republicans were, by virtue of advocating Abolition, the Liberals.

That would change by the end of the century, as already explained.

LEARN the above, as there will be a quiz. Your thread is now kaputulated. That will be $12.78 in labor plus $3000 in fines for lying.


/thread

Atwater also said, in that same interview, that his generation of Southerns, ie the Baby Boomers, were not racist.


You believe that as much as you believe in the southern strategy? Or you going to pick and choose?

It's a quote. Prove it isn't.

Besides which, nothing IN the quote suggests that strategy is targeting "baby boomers". Far from it. Nice try, absence of cigar.

Fun fact: Lee Atwater was from Atlanta. Birthplace of the Klan. What they both have in common: targeting racists for personal gain, using principles in which the targeter didn't even necessarily believe in. Neither had any principles beyond "what's in it for me".

1. Sure, it's a quote. Years after the fact. And with no evidence that that view was ever used for campaigning or policy.

Good CHRIST.

***ALL*** quotes are after the fact. That's what makes them QUOTES.

Holy SHIT it's dense in here.

"No evidence it was used for campaigning or policy"?????? He was the FUCKING BUSH CAMPAIGN MANAGER and the Deputy Campaign Manager for Reagan. Ever heard of Willie Horton?

>> Bush campaign strategist Lee Atwater knew talking about Horton could be devastating to the Democratic nominee.

"Lee knew that it was powerful. Lee knew that it fit a liberal stereotype that would make a larger point about Dukakis," Bush deputy campaign manager Ed Rogers said in the CNN documentary "Race for The White House: George H.W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis."
"Lee also knew that he could be radioactive with Bush. That if it weren't handled right, Bush wouldn't use it. Bush would declare it off-limits."

After the independent group's ad aired, Bush's campaign later produced a related spot called "Revolving Door" that showed convicts walking in and out of prison as the narrator explained Dukakis' liberal positions on issues like mandatory sentencing for drug dealers without showing or mentioning Horton by name. << -- the 30-year-old Willie Horton ad

There's your "no evidence". Go ahead, deny it's sitting right there on the page. Have fun.

2. So, do you believe Atwater's qoute that the South stopped being racist, with the Baby Boom generation? Or is he only an Authority when it suits you?

It's IRRELEVANT to the question of the existence of a strategy to milk that element.

Once AGAIN ---- in 1968, which is where he dates the beginning of said strategy, baby boomers were just barely old enough to vote. The voting population as a whole was older than that, and that was where the numbers were.

1. The Horton rapes showed, truthfully that Dukakis was soft on crime to the detriment of his people. That was a valid policy issue. Your assumption that is was about race, says more about you, than it does about Bush.


2. DO YOU BELIEVE ATWATER THAT THE SOUTH STOPPED BEING RACIST, WITH THE BABY BOOM GENERATION?

What I believe is that you're too DENSE to read the fucking post.

Once AGAIN --- Atwater's assessment, or anyone's assessment, of Southern baby boomers is --- wait for it --- IRRELEVANT TO ANYTHING. The question was about the existence of a Southern Strategy and how it worked--- not the social demographics of a fucking baby boom generation, to which you're trying to shift the point because you can't deal with the one on the table.

As for the irrelevant point itself, to which you provided no documentation whatsoever, I don't believe in blanket statements. And I live in the South, so I can trot out example after example after example to disprove it anyway. Here's one, let's see if you recognize him.

​

As to the Horton ad, I've already shown you that Atwater himself thought it was about race, so again, nice try but you'll still need money to buy an actual cigar.

 

[danielpalos]

Our Civil War should have never happened, because abolition was federal policy and eminent domain should have applied.