So it looks like Team Romney is shoving all their chips into the middle of the table and betting the whole shooting match on running a straight Lee Atwater. The message will be “Vote Romney or Obama will take away your Medicare and give it to the [INSERT RACIST EPITHET HERE]”.
Never mind that the much-vaunted $700 million in Medicare cuts come from gutting Medicare Advantage, a program that basically existed to pay private middlemen for no apparent reason, and not from actual benefits at all. Nor that the much-vaunted changes to welfare are in fact waivers requested by Republican governors, and are offered on the condition that they produce equal or greater numbers of working welfare recipients. What Team Romney is doing is called “lying.” It is a process by which one tells the opposite of the truth.
But this is the last call for the Old Ones and Romney is betting the farm on them: scare the working-class whites and the old folks into turning out in droves by appealing to racism. It is as cynical as it is predictable. And with Mike Huckabee ticketed for a prime-time speaking slot after two weeks of being the number-one apologist for Todd Akin, the argument that the GOP is going to press the economy and stay away from culture-war politics is, quite simply, no longer operative.
Which goes back to my impatience and frustration in 2009…
…I would like to take a second to remind the mouth-breathing trailer-park proctologists of the Old Confederacy: your team lost. Your boy and your Congressional majority lost because your team shit the bed for eight years running. As a result, we are now engaged in a long hard slog to try to clean things up. Your boys had the run of things for quite some time, and the result was utter and comprehensive failure, from Afghanistan to deficits to Katrina to I don’t know what all. And right now, all I’m seeing from the opposition is the same dog-vomit of tax cuts, bigoted scaremongering, and fantasyland pig-ignorance that the GOP’s been running on for the better part of two decades, ever since George HW Bush and Lee Atwater decided all’s fair in politics. There’s not even a coherent theme there – except that there is, and for all the talk about government power and health care takeover and everything else, this is what it boils down to: we can’t stand the fact that we got beat, and by a Negro.
You know what? The hell with it. Let’s go. We all know you’ve wanted a rematch since 1865. Do it. Rise again. Get out all your M4geries and your cheap Norinco AK-knockoffs and your precious Kimbers and SIGs and let’s just do the goddamn thing…
The GOP is calling on its loyalists to rally ’round the flag one more time. And once again, it’s the Confederate flag. Seventh verse, same as the first, and unchanging since 1988. But the day is coming – and come soon, Lord Jesus – when every single unreconstructed-white-cracker vote that exists won’t be enough to make a win. And at that point, the Southern Strategy will have to be flung on the ash heap of history.
We just have to survive until then.