Posted on 10/29/2007 4:03:12 PM PDT by neverdem
I have to go with Huck on this one. While the author makes this single distinction between Jindal and blacks the entire rest of the article focuses on blacks.
It's poorly written at best or the author does not know that Indians are Caucasians. Or, he's simply assuming that all white Southern voters are too stupid to know this.
Thanks for the ping!
A narrative has been constructed by Democrats and their media allies castigating Republicans as purveyors of a racist "Southern strategy" to explain the transition of the South from solidly Democrat to solidly Republican. If a tree can be judged by its fruit, this narrative is backwards.When the 1994 "Contract with America" approach bore fruit, Pubbies made gains in the South, including some party switchers. Before the new congress was sworn in, the Dhimmicrats began their broad attack on tobacco -- amazing that tobacco had no ill health effects for the previous 58 years, during the rickety FDR coalition.
Yes, I am excited about this man.
I think this is the money quote:In order "to benefit politically from racial polarization" Republicans have worked to maximize black congressional representation by creating black-majority congressional districts. These efforts transform the Democratic Party, keep segregationist Democrat politicians neutered, and drive southern whites away from the Democrat organizations. The Republicans in 43 years have produced results that are precisely opposite the Democrats' results from their nearly 200 years of "trying to benefit politically from racial polarization."That is, racial polarization was a fact of Southern life for 200 years, and the Democratic Party was very successful in benefiting from it over the party's entire history up until 1968. Republicans didn't invent racial polarization, and it didn't invent profiting politically by it - but, starting in 1968, it has actually turned racial polarization to its own advantage.But the crucial point, the point of the quote, is the effect of Republican efforts to "benefit from racial polarization." What it has done is to neuter white Democrat segregationists by empowering, in a limited way, black Democrat segregationists. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 led to gerrymandering blacks into a few preponderantly black districts, minimizing black influence in the rest of the districts. The irony of the act was that although it was an LBJ initiative it was (as the article notes) enacted with majority Republican votes and a minority of Democratic votes - and the day that he signed it, LBJ foresaw that it would give the Republican Party control of the South.
So in a very real sense the Republican solid South was consciously constructed by LBJ. And although the Republican Solid South includes old white segregationists (witness Strom Thurmond), the Republican Party did not become segregationist in order to attract them. Rather, the white South could never move past segregationism without a political upheaval, and that upheaval was the move of the white South to the Republican Party.
Has the white South transcended its racist past? I would hesitate to go that far, but I would only note that according to Thomas Sowell he has seen the time when was as much as his life was worth to be seen as a negro man with a white woman in the South - and yet in recent years he has been in restaurants in Atlanta with white women and felt perfectly comfortable. As recently as 1960, I myself publicly danced with a negro woman and felt like every eye in the room was on me - even in the North.
I question whether that has entirely dissipated. But that is hardly the same as saying that there has been no change at all - and that is in fact the position of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is in fact not "progressive" but reactionary.
The blue and red colors on a Presidential election map have been traditional until 2004. The party holding the Whitehouse has been traditionally colored blue, while the party not controlling the Whitehouse has traditionally colored red.
That means in 1976, when Carter won Georgia, Georgia was a “red state”, because the Republicans controlled the Whitehouse and Carter was a Democrat. In 1980 when Carter again won Georgia, Georgia was a “blue state” because he (and therefore the Democrats) held the Whitehouse.
In 1984, Brinkley famously referred to Reagan’s landslide as a “Sea of Blue”. Since the Republican’s held the Whitehouse, they were “blue”.
In 2000, there came the phrases “red state” and “blue state”. The MSM took up those nicknames and changed tradition in the 2004 election making Bush’s States Red and Kerry’s States Blue, breaking the general tradition that went back to 1968 (first color television coverage of an election).
Reference 3. ^ Boyd, James (May 17, 1970) "Nixon's Southern strategy: 'It's All in the Charts'". New York Times. p. 215.
Page 215 of the NY Times makes no sense to me.
You can find that article as a PDF here: www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf. The Times listed page 25 as page 215 when they put it online. They also didn't say it was from the New York Times Magazine, not the regular newspaper.
It's not really a study of "the Southern strategy." It's a portrait/trashing of Kevin Phillips. As such, it has more to do with Northern Irish and Italians than Southern Whites.
In 1970 the Times Magazine set felt more comfortable with the New Left than with conservative Republicans. Still, Phillips did rub a lot of people the wrong way, reducing politics to ethnic antagonisms.
Looking back three decades, though, Phillips doesn't have to be ashamed of the substance of his ideas, though he wasn't the best spokesman for the political strategies he supported.
Notice though, that the Wikipedia entry cites another Times article that contradicts the standard liberal assumptions about the "Southern strategy": "Risen, Clay (December 10, 2006) "Myth of the Southern Strategy." New York Times. p. 10-2b (also apparently from the Magazine.
I'd agree with you about not trusting Wikipedia where political opinions are concerned. Maybe not even for facts. But someone says something about elections 150 years ago -- as in the Medved article -- that doesn't jibe with common on-line reference works it's a sign that they may not be right. We'd have to do more research, though, before we can come to any real conclusions about this "Opposition" or "Opposition Party" of 1854.
Thanks for the links, but you do see my point. Page 215 doesn't even make sense for the Sunday Magazine. Unless someone is thoroughly familiar with the material, how do you make sense out a typo like that?
Do you have a source for that?
Red=Blood of Christ
White=Purity of Christ
Blue=Law of God
The Rodent Commie Party can change us from Blue to Red however jokes on them...RED...BLOOD OF CHRIST...
http://www.presidentelect.org/index.html
It’s unofficial but the color scheme is what I remember since I started paying attention to politics.
I’ll look for the source. I was a Poli Sci major in undergrad (88 to 92) and that was what we learned. NBC and CBS held to that tradition until 2004, I know that (ABC was always a bit odd).
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