The White Party
Columbia prof, Thomas Edsall writing in today's NY Times, points out that the GOP has become the "white party," armed strategically with a racist, anti-Latino, anti-immigrant election strategy. It's a strategy that worked successfully in the mid-term elections. In the current Republican primary, says Edsall, any Republican candidate that, even momentarily stumbles on this, will pay for it in the polls. Case in point was Rick Perry.
The once-ascendant Perry torpedoed his own bid during a Sept. 22 debate in Orlando, Fla., when he endorsed using taxpayer dollars to educate the children of illegal immigrants. A single sentence started him on a downward slide:
If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.Edsall thinks that the major threat to the Republican “white” strategy is a revival of the high turnout among minorities that carried Democrats to victory in 2008. Republicans, however, are taking advantage of their newly