The 2008 presidential campaign will go down in history for accomplishing a great many things, not the least of which may be the death of the so-called Southern strategy. The Southern strategy was basically a conscious policy of polarizing the electorate by playing on the fears, actually the racism, of Southern white voters and later of white voters in general. It was first used in 1968 by Richard Nixon and continued to be utilized, in some iteration or another, by Republicans ever since. This election may well mark the death of this strategy, not because it is morally repugnant, but because it no longer effective.
As articulated cogently by Kevin Phillips, this is the heart of the Southern Strategy:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Later generations of political apparatchiks, from Lee Atwater to Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to Steve Schmidt, continued to use it is in some form. Atwater was the most explicit in stating the strategy’s racist core:
As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964... and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...
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 forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.
On his deathbed, Lee Atwater, a mean SOB, disavowed this divisive strategy. Not so Republicans. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, each succeeding generation of Repubs has successfully used the Southern strategy of fear and divide to win elections. John McCain will not be the last to use the strategy but he will likely go down as the politician who flailed about, only to see the strategy fail against a charismatic and brilliant African American candidate: the very antithesis of the Southern strategy. I am in full agreement with Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times, that the post-election Republican Party will not engage in needed soul-searching but will retreat to its vilest right-wing corner. Sarah Palin will become the darling of the evangelical Republican base. And we know damn well that she is a master at the art of the coded message of hate.