"Moderate" Republican Lindsay Graham:
"There's a reason no president has ever been reelected with an economy like this," Graham said. "It would tell me that it's more of a demographic race for president than it is a performance-based race. And that may be where we're at as a nation, and maybe where we are as a party, and we just don't know it."
Thank you, Lindsay for that ignorant and racist statement. Let's look at it closely.
Graham is essentially saying that whites vote based on performance on the economy, but minorities don't, i.e., if only whites were still a greater majority, they would be sensible enough to vote based on performance.
Let's look closely at Graham's Racist and Poorly Informed Fallacies:
1. "Whites" vote on "performance." Remember those buses filled with anti-gay marriage church members pulling up to the polls in 2004. Were they voting for "performance" on the economy? Were Bush 2000 voters voting for performance on the (booming) economy? Is it possible, Lindsay, that "minorities" this year rationally perceive that a Republican administration will be terrible for them economically?
2. Obama's "performance" on the economy is the only economic issue this year: The Republican platform this year can be translated as "We're Going to Screw You. Vote for Us." They are openly proposing gutting and voucherizing Medicare, (a little less openly) privatizing social security, and passing massive tax cuts for the wealthy. The public (whites included), are finally realizing that Republicans want to screw them (unlike in 2010, when the R's succeeded in making the D's a threat to Medicare).
3. Obama's "performance" has been terrible ("No President" has been elected with this performance.): This is a pernicious theme because it is also the "Chuck Todd/Mark Halperin/esteemed political scientist" CW. Unlike Graham and those VSP's, voters remember how terrible the economy was in 2008, and still blame Bush for it.
The "Great Recession" was the greatest economic disaster for this country since the 1930's Depression. Therefore, the only really comparable year is 1936, when FDR managed to get elected in a landslide even though unemployment "only" dropped from 23.6% in 1932 to 16.9% in 1936. Similarly, unemployment has dropped from a high of 10% at the peak of the recession to the current 8.1%, and jobs have grown by millions since that peak.
So Lindsay, stop pretending to be a "moderate." Scratch the surface and you're as racist and dumb as your SC colleague Jim DeMint.