Rachel Maddow and Rick Perlstein on Michael Steele's Admission of a GOP Southern Strategy

By Heather
CrooksandLiars
Sunday Apr 25, 2010

Rachel Maddow talked to Nixonland author Rick Perlstein about Michael Steele's admission that there is actually a Southern Strategy and that they have alienated minority voters by using it. As TPM noted the Republicans are not happy with him for this.

Touchy Subject: Steele Slammed For Criticizing GOP's Southern Strategy:

Michael Steele's charge this week that the GOP's southern strategy has "alienated" minority voters may not have provoked as many headlines as a trip by young Republicans to a lesbian bondage club. But in the long run it could cause just as much trouble for him.

During a speech at DePaul University, Steele declared:

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. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, "Bubba" went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.

He added that, even today, blacks "really don't have a reason" to vote for the GOP.

The remarks represented a frontal challenge to the party's preferred version of history, which has long denied that race-based appeals have played any role in the GOP's success in the south, at least in the post-Nixon age. And some defenders of that line are responding as you'd expect.

(Continued here.)