If you haven't read it yet, check out George Packer's essay in this week's New Yorker magazine titled "The Fall of Conservativism." It is an obituary and a chilling history lesson well worth reading in its entirety.
But what I want to highlight is a section on the work of a young political strategist named Patrick Buchanan in advising Richard Nixon. Of course, we all know about "the southern strategy" and "the silent majority," but it is quite revealing to read the original and specific language that was used to launch these initiatives, especially when the author is still enjoying a seat at the table, still deploying a powerful megaphone to do EXACTLY what is indicated in the title of his 1971 memorandum: "Dividing the Democrats." Follow me below the jump for the full quote:
Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—"A little raw for today," he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."
So this partisan ideologue is given an opportunity, night after night, to supply "objective analysis" of current politics, and uses that opportunity to do NOTHING but repeat the substance of this 37 year old race-baiting strategy for dividing the Democratic party and the American people? Of course all the Washington insiders on MSNBC know this and consider it a bit of a joke, I suppose. But oughtn't uncle Pat come with a disclaimer that labels him "author of 'Dividing The Democrats'?
We all take solace, I'm sure, in Packer's conclusion that the attempts to use this strategy on the part of Republicans are "the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that's brain-dead [one with]. . . no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people." Still, there is no question that these spasms, as exploited by the Clintons (with a huge assist from Limbaugh and Buchanan) have done serious and perhaps long-term damage.