The Republican Party has long had the perception of being the party for white men. History has of course proven that this is an absolutely correct assertion. When it comes to courting voters of color, the Republicans have been outright belligerent and hostile. Since the days of Richard Nixon, the Republican Party has perfected the art of race baiting to a fine science. They have mastered this technique of using certain phrases and code words that can clearly be seen as “dog whistle politics.” In the past, these tactics have been expertly used to great success.
In 1968, Nixon pursued his famous “Southern Strategy,” in which he stressed the need for “law and order,” which was used as a way to appeal to whites who believed that blacks were violent thugs who set cities ablaze. Reagan kicked off his Presidential campaign in 1980 not in his adopted hometown in Los Angeles or his birthplace of Dixon, Illinois but in Philadelphia, Mississippi which was the town that civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were brutally lynched in 1964.
If that was not insulting enough, he gave a speech that was about “state’s rights,” which has been the rallying cry for the Confederates and their children to oppose blacks having full and equal rights.
In 1990, the ferociously racist North Carolina senator Jesse Helms ran one of the most blatantly racist campaigns in political history. He was running against Harvey Gantt, who was the state’s first black U.S. Senate nominee. The race was tight but Helms knew that he could always count on racism as his key to victory. He ran an ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling up a rejection letter with a voice in the background saying, “you needed that job but you lost it to a minority because of a racial quota.” This is the legacy of the modern Republican Party but apparently the RNC thinks that people are too stupid to remember all of this.
On the new amateur made RNC website, they have a page that includes so-called “Heroes.” One of the heroes is Jackie Robinson. This flies in the face of reality but I have to remember whom I am speaking about. Yes, Jackie Robinson was a Republican who voted for Nixon in 1960 but he was far from a GOP hero. While speaking about the relationship between blacks and Republicans, he wrote, “By and large, Republicans had ignored blacks and sometimes handpicked a few servile leaders in the black community to be their token n******.” (I would suggest Michael and Clarence read that very carefully.)
On his thoughts of the 1964 Presidential elections, he wrote, “A Barry Goldwater victory would insure that the GOP would be completely the white man’s party…What happened at San Francisco with Senator Goldwater becoming the Republican standard-bearer confirmed my prediction.”
While he was at the convention, he wrote that he had an “understanding of what it must have felt like to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Lastly on describing his political philosophy, he wrote, “I’ve never identified myself with another party or another in politics,” this suggests that he preferred to be seen as an independent, especially considering his support for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Oh yes, he sure sounded like a dyed in the wool, conservative Republican. If they are going to massively distort history, they should at least do a better job at being deceptive.
But this is part of the campaign that Republicans have used over time to distort the history of their party so that it can fight back against the view that it is only a party of white men. A popular claim was that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. Dr. King may have been a Republican at one point but does anyone really believe that he was stumping for Goldwater and Nixon? Another distortion was that Democratic senators voted en masse against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They will list senators like Richard Russell and Harry Byrd. But if you take a closer look, you will see that these were Southern conservative Dixiecrats who had far more in common with conservative Republicans than the liberal members of their party. Every Democratic senator from a non-Southern state did vote for the Civil Rights Act. That is why the South, which was solidly Democratic, now votes Republican.
They can re-write their history as much as they want but anyone who has a brain can see that the Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln, Douglass, Stevens and Sumner but rather the party of Thurmond, Thomas, Helms and Lott. As said on the Huffington Post, the Republicans are trying to re-pitch that “big tent” but the winds of truth keep blowing them.”
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