“They are yet more evidence that he is following a template known as the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy,” which plays to white voters’ racial resentment”
The Myth of ‘the Southern Strategy’
“It’s an easy story to believe, but this year two political scientists called it into question. In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth”
-snip
“To be sure, Shafer says, many whites in the South aggressively opposed liberal Democrats on race issues. “But when folks went to the polling booths,” he says, “they didn’t shoot off their own toes. They voted by their economic preferences, not racial preferences.””
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.html
The Neocons and Nixon’s Southern Strategy
Between 1969 and 1974, Nixon – who believed that blacks had gotten a raw deal in America and wanted to extend a helping hand:
* raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
* doubled the budget for black colleges;
* appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions
than any president, including LBJ;
* adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks
in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and
universities;
* invented “Black Capitalism” (the Office of Minority Business
Enterprise), raised U.S. purchases from black businesses
from $9 million to $153 million, increased small business
loans to minorities 1,000 percent, increased U.S. deposits
in minority-owned banks 4,000 percent;
* raised the share of Southern schools that were
desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent. Wrote the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, “It has only been
since 1968 that substantial reduction of racial segregation
has taken place in the South.”
The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie. Nixon routed the left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-the-neocons-and-nixons-southern-strategy-512
David Horowitz - June 2000: Hillary Clinton and "The Third Way" How America's First Lady of the Left Has Bamboozled Liberals and Conservatives Alike
".....[Socialists] hate [conservatives] because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left—by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints."....