Courtesy of Bob Herbert: It's an old one, but it is worth remembering:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger,' " said Atwater. "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."
That's Lee Atwater describing the Republican Party's "Southern Strategy" to a polisci professor at CWRU in 1981. Lee Atwater, for those who don't recall, was the campaign manager for Bush Sr.'s 1998 run at the White House. Willie Horton? That was him.
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