GOP Apostasy

From the "We Did Not Know That" file, we see that Republican apostate Bruce Bartlett, who's gotten a certain amount of press attention because his economic head is no longer shoved as far up his ass as most of his once-fellow travelers is one of the toads responsible for the pathetic "Robert Byrd was a Klansman" trope typed so often by drooling cretins who troll reality-based spots on the Internet.

Seeing the demographic trends toward an increasingly nonwhite electorate, which were obvious in easily available census projections, I decided to write a book about how Republicans could deal with it. I concluded that the anti-immigrant attitude among the Republican base was too severe for the party to reach out meaningfully to the fast-growing Latino community. Recall that Bush’s proposal for immigration reform was soundly rejected by his own party.

If Republicans had no hope of attracting Latino votes, what other nonwhite group could they attract? Maybe the time had come for them to make a major play for the black vote. I thought that blacks and Latinos were natural political and economic competitors, and I saw in poll data that blacks were receptive to a hardline position on illegal immigration. I also knew that many blacks felt ignored by Democrats, who simply took their votes for granted—as Republicans did for 60 years after the Civil War.

If Republicans could only increase their share of the black vote from 10 percent, which it had been since Goldwater, to the 30 percent level that Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed, it would have major electoral ramifications.

The best way to get Republicans to read a book about reaching out for the black vote, I thought, was to detail the Democratic Party’s long history of maltreatment of blacks. After all, the party was based in the South for 100 years after the war, and all of the ugly racism we associate with that region was enacted and enforced by Democratic politicians. I was surprised that such a book didn’t already exist.

I thought knowing the Democratic Party’s pre-1964 history of racism, which is indisputable, would give Republicans a story to tell when they went before black groups to solicit votes. I thought it would also make Republicans more sympathetic to the problems of the black community, many of which are historical in their origins. Analyses by economists and sociologists show that historical racism still holds back African-Americans even though it has diminished radically since the 1960s.

So I wrote Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. Unfortunately, it was published the day Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. But I still held out hope that Hillary Clinton, who was pandering to the white working class in unsubtle racial terms, would capture the Democratic nomination. The anger among blacks at having the nomination effectively stolen from Obama would make them highly receptive to GOP outreach, I believed. I even met with John McCain’s staff about this.

Apparently the only Americans idiotic enough to ignore the "Southern Strategy" & what the two parties represent here & now are the drooling trolls mentioned, & the kind of cretinous honkie who likes to screech "liberals are the real racists" while quoting The Bell Curve in the closed loop of reactionary sites.

Now who's "reality-based?"