Lee Atwater let the cat out of the bag way back in 1981, and it is still true.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
So if Republican polices don’t seem to make sense, it doesn’t matter. They aren’t supposed to. They are simply there to show that the GOP hates blacks. If their policies hurt middle and lower class whites, it doesn’t matter as long as “blacks get hurt worse.”
That is the GOP that Tom Carper and Chris Coons want to find common ground with. That’s Chris Coons’ prayer group for you. And it isn’t some kind of closely guarded secret. They’ve been using this playbook since Nixon.
