It isn't surprising that the 2008 GOP playbook against Barack Obama will focus on race. But as Paul Waldman has discovered, the attacks will be anything but subtle:
The voters Obama needs, it is now sometimes said, are the "Reagan Democrats," those blue-collar whites who rejected their traditional ties to the Democratic party to support Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. But one of the things that has been forgotten about the Reagan Democrats is that the phenomenon was built almost entirely on racial resentment. The question now is, will those voters be receptive to a black candidate? At their birth nearly a quarter century ago, the answer most certainly would have been no. ...
It's almost three decades later, and American opinions on race have become far more progressive in the interim. But Greenberg's point about how "progressive symbols and themes have been redefined in racial and pejorative terms" points to an effort at which Reagan excelled but Republicans continued after he was gone. They successfully defined nearly the entire project of government in domestic affairs as taking money from hard-working white people and giving it to shiftless blacks. When Newt Gingrich wanted to fight Bill Clinton's spending bills, he offered a new version of Reagan's "welfare queen" -- the nefarious money pit known as "midnight basketball," a catch-all for efforts to give inner-city kids an alternative to hanging out on streetcorners. It may have been offered only a tiny bit of federal funds, but the specter of taxpayer money going to black teenagers was just too much to stomach. As Gingrich understood as well as anyone, merely invoking certain kinds of government spending is enough to activate associations with undeserving or even threatening blacks in the minds of many voters. (One reason why: as copious media research has demonstrated, news programs are more likely to show images of African-Americans when they talk about poverty, welfare, and drugs -- despite the fact that most poor people, welfare recipients, and drug users are white.) And let's not forget that it isn't just blue-collar whites who are susceptible to racial appeals. The working class hardly has a monopoly on racist sentiments.
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--The Editors
