Bruce Bartlett: Revenge of the Reality-Based Community-My life on the Republican right & and how...

[JHB]

26. He's getting closer, but still won't admit he's still missing some points:

(link to Bartlett's article rather than commentary on it):
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revenge-of-the-reality-based-community/

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.

The problem with his book wasn't that it Obama's win buried it. It's that the premise ignores the most important reason for the shift in black voting:

The Republican party actively recruited the racist wing of the Democratic party, and they've done it for just about Bartlett's entire lifetime. Guys like William F. Buckley supported "states rights" and nostrums about black inferiority even while trying to beat back the Bircher anti-semites for the definition of conservativism. If he could get conservative jews and conservative southerners on board he could have a conservative ascendancy.

This was made explicit by Nixon's "Southern Strategy." Reagan didn't hesitate to play to racists to gain support, he just knew to use code words to pretend he he wasn't. The rise of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh to leadership positions (official and unofficial) guaranteed that the Republicans would continue to play toward the worst elements.

And if you don't think other people already know this, maybe you still have some more rethinking to do.