During her honeymoon speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Sarah Palin echoed a jab at Barack Obama that had been lurking around in Republican circles for most of that year. Earlier at the convention, Rudy Giuliani famously brought it up through his gigantically-toothy grin and childish giggling. But it was Sarah Palin who would get most of the credit for it.
I’m referring here to the emphasis on President Obama’s service as an urban community organizer. Clearly, this was a Southern Strategy-style racial dog whistle — a way of underscoring the president’s ethnicity, his race and his association with scary inner-city black people.
It’s worth mentioning again the Lee Atwater quote regarding the functional language of the Southern Strategy. Suffice to say, Atwater made it perfectly clear that Republican political tactics included (and still do) exploiting race — winning white votes by demonizing blacks. And the way to play this game in the modern age was to use code language. Dog whistles, because overt racial language would too easily “back fire.”
At the time, Atwater suggested the exploitation of issues like tax cuts or states rights with the implication that the Republican Party supported the preservation of white dominance. (Not surprisingly, tax cuts and states rights dominate the 2010 political discourse.) And the demagoguing of issues like welfare, affirmative action or Medicaid would underscore, to predisposed white voters, the fallacious notion of lazy black freeloaders horking white jobs and white tax dollars and not contributing anything to society other than crime.
And there was Sarah Palin in her prime time debut mocking the president’s early career as a community organizer — the implication being that the president was a product of black culture and not “real Americans.” Combine this with the ongoing emphasis on the president’s “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plummer — the Republicans very obviously playing the “welfare queen” dog whistle here. And we all remember how Sarah Palin went “rogue” and fueled the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim-terrorist myth (part of early Birther lore) by repeatedly telling her rabid white audiences that the president “palled around with terrorists.”
Sarah Palin is and was a Southern Strategist.
Michael Steele: GOP Will Not Take Over House In 2010
Posted in GOP, Michael Steele, Sean Hannity, tagged Gop Committees, Gop Steele, Michael Steele, Nrcc Michael Steele, Sean Hannity, Steele Comments, Steele Remark on January 5, 2010| 1 Comment »
NRCC Pushes Back Against Steele Over 2010 Pessimism, GOP Operatives Furious
First Posted: 01- 5-10 10:26 AM | Updated: 01- 5-10 10:42 AM
Republican operatives are privately furious with RNC Chairman Michael Steele for predicting on Monday night that the GOP will not take over the House of Representatives in 2010.
One strategist called the comment “stupid,” arguing that it will put the party in a bind when it comes to candidate recruitment and generally lower expectations and excitement over the 2010 elections. Others, who refused to go on the record, lamented the inevitable follow-up questions that would be asked to Republicans, such as: do you agree with the sentiments of the RNC Chairman?
And, sure enough, on Tuesday, the National Congressional Campaign Committee released a statement in which it basically slapped down Steele for his electoral prognostication.
“The NRCC’s goal — as the campaign arm of the House Republican Conference — has always been to recapture the majority in 2010,” said Ken Spain, press secretary for the committee. “Independent political analysts and even liberal columnists have stated that Republicans have a very real shot at taking back the majority in 2010. Make no mistake about it, we are playing to win.”
It is extremely rare to see two campaign committees on such different pages when it comes to messaging. Steele was able to survive a rocky start to his tenure at the RNC. But the grumbling never fully died down — and his remarks on Sean Hannity’s radio show Monday night have only exacerbated the situation.
“I can’t give a number [of seats the GOP will win] yet, because like I said, we’re just now beginning to look at the races,” Steele said. Asked if Republicans will take back the House, he confessed: “Not this year.”
“I don’t know all the candidates yet,” Steele added. “We still have some vacancies that need to get filled, but then the question we need to ask ourselves is: ‘If we do that, are we ready?'”
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