So it looks like Lindsey Graham has actually worked out the math and sees that the GOP can’t survive much longer as the Angry White Guy Party.
Jay Bookman at the AJC hears Graham and thinks of Rmoney’s lies about welfare:
The ad is blatantly false, but it is nonetheless effective at “generating angry white guys,” to borrow Graham’s phrase. But as Graham also notes, the strategy behind it is not going to work much longer. Sheer math will not allow it. And every vote that such a strategy purchases in this election cycle will cost the Republicans dearly in every election for the next generation. With such ads, they are in effect eating their seed corn.
The Southern Strategy as long term suicide. That seems right to me. But much like Ann Romney telling Hispanic voters that if they’d get rid of their biases, they’d like the Republicans a whole lot more, the GOP spends alot of its time blaming the people they covet as voters for their problem:
Blaming potential customers for not liking your product gets you nowhere. In fact, if the customer picks up on that attitude, as they inevitably do, it guarantees that they’re going to like you even less.
And I’ll go further — when you make something like the Southern Strategy a key way to fire up part of your base, you have offended a good many of the ethnic groups you want to join you already. Why should I join up with a group of people who are going to demonize people like me for political gain?
Quoting Ron Brownstein from the National Journal:
“Republican strategists clearly feel the weight of trying to assemble a national majority with so little support among minorities that they must win three in five whites. “This is the last time anyone will try to do this,” one said. A GOP coalition that relies almost entirely on whites could squeeze out one more narrow victory in November. But if Republicans can’t find more effective ways to bridge the priorities of their conservative core and the diversifying Next America, that weight will grow more daunting every year.”
Right. And it can’t happen fast enough.