Lee Atwater on the power of the term "forced busing"

[StarfishSaver]

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'

(From an interview with Alexander P. Lamis (8 July 1981), as quoted in The Two-Party South (1984)? by Alexander P. Lamis; originally published as an interview with an anonymous insider, Atwater was not revealed to be the person interviewed until the 1990 edition; also quoted in "Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant" by Bob Herbert in The New York Times (6 October 2005)) https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater

[JoeOtterbein]

1. Hi! I rec'ed of course for content, but did you mean to title; "Lee Atwater..."? nt

[StarfishSaver]

4. I fixed it - thanks!

[pressbox69]

2. The GOP will

forever need to atone for being the party of Atwater. Problem is today that party is overloaded with Atwaters.

[StarfishSaver]

5. True

But we Democrats need to be very careful about not unwittingly adopting his code words as our own.

[Blue_true]

3. Atwater suffered a slow death due to cancer.

He repented near the end of his life on the racial stuff that he had did. But too late, if there is a hell, he is there.