I am a southerner. I was born in Mississippi, went to college at Auburn Alabama, law school at the University of Mississippi and except for a year in Sacramento, California, I have spent my entire life in the South. I practiced law in Atlanta for a decade, and I currently practice law in South Florida. The Republican southern strategy is something I know about and have lived most of my life. Harry Truman integrated the armed forces, both because it was the right thing to do
and because he needed African American votes in the big cities in the North (see David McCollugh's
Truman). Truman understood the politics.
In the late 1950's Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, brought the civil rights bill to the floor. Vice President Richard Nixon encouraged the GOP senators to support a civil rights bill at the same time (Robert Caro, Master of the Senate. Both understood the politics. Johnson wanted to run for president someday, but knew the South's opposition to civil rights would doom the candidacy of any southern politician with an anti-civil rights record and any southern politician who voted for a civil rights bill at home would likely never hold office again. The careers of Alabama's governor's Big Jim Folsom and George C. Wallace provide the evidence of the accuracy of Johnson's belief. Richard Nixon, like Karl Rove today, wanted to pry lose a democratic constituency and regain the African American vote for the GOP. I'd like to think Johnson also knew it was the right thing to do.
After the Kennedy & Johnson presidencies and the civil right bills and the appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, Nixon knew the African American vote was lost to the GOP for the foreseeable future. In 1968, Nixon adopted Kevin Phillip's now infamous Southern Strategy to woo white southern democrats discontented with integration. Reagan's evocation of states rights in the 1980 election in Philadelphia Mississippi (the seen of the murder of civil rights' workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman), the Willie Horton commercials (George I and Rove's mentor, Lee Atwater made sure that the commercial of Willie Horton showed that he was black), Jesse Helm's notorious "you needed that job" commercial with the camera focusing on a pair of black hands and of course, the use of the symbolism of the Confederate flag show the GOP has followed that strategy with a vengeance ever since.
Fast forward to this election. Howard Dean becomes one of the first (as far as I am aware, feel free to correct me) to directly attack the GOP's standard bearer for embracing the southern strategy.
"In 1968, [Republican] Richard Nixon won the White House...He did it in a shameful way: by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people. They called it the southern strategy, and the Republicans have been using it ever since... It's time we had a new politics in America -- a politics that refuses to pander to our lowest prejudices... If the president tries to divide us by race, we are going to talk about health care for Americans," he said. "If Karl Rove tries to divide us by gender, we are going to talk about better schools for all our children."
All I can say is- its about time. Keep hammering on "This President appeals to the worst in us" and how Dean will appeal to the "best in us". While we are at it, start reminding voters that Georgia's Republican Governor, Sonny Perdue, campaigned against Democrat Roy Barnes using the Confederate flag as a wedge issue and won in 2002. Its been a year, and the Georgia state flag hasn't changed and isn't going to be changed by Sonny Perdue. When George W. Bush wraps himself in that flag as he did during the 2000 election in South Carolina, nothing is going to change. You've been had. Isn't time to start voting our common interests? Isn't it time to start voting for health care and on economic interests?