Pat Buchanan has a lovely little column on a conservative site, Human Events. In it, he not only exhorts the GOP to attack Sotomayor as a racist, but also claims that the key to GOP victory is further shoring up their portion of the white vote. Example:
If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.
And:
Why did McCain fail to win the white conservative Democrats Hillary Clinton swept in the primaries? He never addressed or cared about their issues.
These are the folks whose jobs have been outsourced to China and Asia, who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors. These are the folks who want the borders secured and the illegals sent back.
Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.
And McCain might be president.
So, yeah, this is repugnant stuff. But, it's also delightfully wrong-headed. For one, Buchanan assumes that all white people are as narrow-minded as he is. Second, the kind of people who are charged up about this stuff make up a shrinking portion of our overall population. If anything, the GOP needs to moderate itself or it risks becoming a powerless fringe group.
Ultimately, I think the crazy right will find themselves marginalized. Moderate Republicans will realize that they need to cast the wingnuts out of the party and our whole political spectrum will correct its course. I can dream, right?
4 comments:
You don't need to dream it Dave, because you are exactly right. The position Buchanan articulated represents a small, nutty segment of the country. By all means let the repubs kowtow to that segment--the demographics tell us they will therefore marginalize themselves. Good riddance.
that comment about Jeremiah Wright is absolutely despicable.
Democrats have their faults, but the Repugs just seem full of hate.
There's been other discussion of demographics and the GOP over the last couple days. Everyone (well, all the liberal blogs I've read) agrees that the Repugs are headed for the political fringes. However, Kevin Drum on Mother Jones raises a good point that the extreme right will probably get more vocal and desperate as they get pushed aside. I think we'll see more tea parties and really crazy rhetoric. Hopefully, it will be limited to that.
It is scary to consider who the fanaticism might play out.
Regarding demographics--and I admit to being in over my head here--it SEEMS like republicans could be effective with Latino voters on conservative social issues (meaning choice and marriage). I mean, my sense is that pious Catholics from Central and S. America would be the same as Southern Baptists on those issues.
But, since repug xenophobia is so overwhelming they've (thankfully) destroyed that chance.
Post a Comment