“Zero Percent of Blacks for Romney”—Oh, that headline hurts. And the WSJ/NBC poll can’t just be dismissed out of hand as the work of partisan hacks.
Romney-Ryan ticket, just that it will be within the margin of error and along the lines last time, when McCain-Palin somehow managed to score 4 percent of the black vote.
But ’twas not always thus for the GOP. Dust off your history books and you will see Republicans once had a virtual lock on the minority vote—and minority elected officials. The legacy of Lincoln was alive and well until not so long ago. Which makes the retreat of recent decades both unfortunate and ill-timed.
“Not so long ago” is before Nixon launched his “southern strategy” to court white southern racists turned off by Lyndon Johnson’s attacks on segregation and support for civil rights, before Ronald Reagan made up his “welfare queen” stealing money from honest taxpayers, before Muslims became the “enemy within” and Hispanics became suspected illegal immigrants, and Asians were just people who refused to speak English.
It’s a long list, so I suppose the shortest description is “before Republicans began to bend over backwards to drive anyone other than white Christians away from the GOP.”
