They just can’t put down the old playbook.
Recently, I found myself shaking my head at the desperation and cluelessness of the Republican strategists who concocted a $10 million plan to stop President Obama from winning a new term by smearing him with Jeremiah Wright’s old words.
In the proposal, titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good,” GOP operatives detail plans for a short film, full-page newspaper ads, and other media exposure to rehash the controversy over Obama’s former pastor, his “goddamn America” speech, and his fiery views about liberation theology.
Too many voters, they said, still like Obama. They need to make voters hate him.
And what better way to do that than with a broader take on the old Southern strategy?
Of course, the times called for them to tweak it a bit.
Instead of playing to white southerners’ late 1960s anxieties about their children sitting next to black schoolchildren, or black families moving into their neighborhoods, this campaign would gin up white people’s fears about whether Obama, if re-elected, would feel free to seek revenge for slavery, Jim Crow, Trayvon Martin and all injustices, real or perceived, committed against black people by white people by heeding to Wright’s sermons.
The man who was eyeing backing the campaign, Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, distanced himself from it once the proposal was leaked to The New York Times, and after Chicagoans expressed outrage. The GOP presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, also disavowed it.
He should have – because the language in it is so loaded with condescension and raw hatred towards Obama that it shows, once again, that not much has changed with the GOP since 1968; that many still believe racism is a winning political strategy.
Check out, for example, this line: “Why has Obama failed in his presidency? Perhaps it’s not the fault of the man who’s trying and failing, but instead the misguided influences of his formative years that have made him this way.”
Forget, for a minute, about the lie that Obama has failed in his presidency. No fair person, or for that matter, no sane person can say that Obama has failed when he oversaw the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden and managed to save the U.S. auto industry.
He isn’t passing with flying colors, but failed? Hell no!
Instead, look at how they are condescending to him. What they’re basically saying is that Obama can’t help himself; that somebody just raised him wrong.
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