Ughhh…
Via WaPo:
Politicians do radio and television hits all of the time — and, typically, very few people pay any attention to what they say on-the-air.
That had to be what former Republican Vice Presidential nominee and Congressman Paul Ryan (Wis) was expecting when he agreed to appear last Wednesday on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America. Instead, Ryan unleashed a weeks-worth of backlash, accusations of racism, and the latest chapter in the long and ongoing narrative of the GOP attempting figure out why it has such little luck with minority voters — especially black ones — when his comments on poverty went viral. […]
Since Ryan’s walk-back of the comments, a vibrant discussion has taken place of whether or not his initial reference to “inner city” poverty was, in fact, a dog whistle — defined as coded racial language designed to rile up voters likely to be mobilized by racially charged rhetoric.
Ryan’s comments have been compared to Newt Gingrich’s labeling of President Obama during the 2012 campaign as the “Food Stamp President” and Ronald Reagan’s blasting of welfare queens. Writing for Politico Magazine, Ian Haney Lopez walks through the history of racial dog whistles being employed by the Republican Party, a tactic former party leaders have admitted to employing.
These instances of racial pandering typically have been treated as disconnected eruptions, when in fact the GOP has made a concerted effort to win support through racial appeals. This pattern is so entrenched — and so well known — that two different chairs of the Republican National Committee have acknowledged and apologized for this strategy.
“By the seventies and into the eighties and nineties,” RNC chair Ken Mehlman said in a 2005 speech before the NAACP, “Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Five years later, his successor Michael Steele similarly acknowledged that “for the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”