10 GOP Race Baiting Tactics or why Blacks (rightfully so) Hate the GOP, Part Two

Its not just that the GOP is bigoted. That seems to be their only appeal. Its not just blacks, either. In fact, in terms of Hater energy, we probably come in fourth compared to the hatred that GOP stalwarts express towards gays, Muslims, and Latinos.

By way of Raw Story:

In the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans may be returning to a game plan that has been effective at garnering the support of white voters while turning off minority voters.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow noted Tuesday at least ten incidents of Republicans intentionally or unintentionally race baiting during the 2010 campaign.

By way of background, Republican Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential race in a landslide. At the same time, he managed to win the southern states, something that no other Republican had done since Reconstruction. It is widely believed that Goldwater did this by promising to repeal the Civil Rights Act if elected.

Although the "Southern strategy" was in place in 1964, the phrase was not popularized until Richard Nixon's political strategist, Kevin Phillips, spoke to the New York Times in 1970:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
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Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele admitted this year that the Republican Party had been using the Southern strategy for decades.

"For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South," he told an audience at DePaul university in April.

In 2006, race baiting may have backfired when former Sen. George Allen lost his race after calling an opponent's staffer "Macaca," a slur used to describe the native population in Central Africa's Belgian Congo.

Maddow set out to highlight two or three occurrences of the strategy being used in this year's elections but instead found many more "1964 moments."

Republican Senate candidate from West Virginia John Raese has repeatedly mangled ethnic names. He called Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor "Sarah Morgan" and "Sarah Manorgan." He also referred to Energy Secretary Steven Chu as "Steven chow mein."

Read the whole thing.