It is not a "Southern Strategy", it is a "Northern Strategy" [View All]

[Kolesar]

It took a decades-long cultural change in the North until racial jokes and racial slurs were eliminated from polite conversation. Progress has been made on race relations in many other aspects also. What Howard Dean is doing with these speeches is reminding northerners that racism is still a big factor in American politics and trying to make republicans in the north feel ashamed of the party that fans the flames of racial hatred to win elections.

Governor Howard Dean in Columbia, South Carolina:

"In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way -- by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people.

They called it the "Southern Strategy," and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like "racial quotas" and "welfare queens" to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America's problems.

The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few.

To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, "guns, God, and gays," dividing us, instead of uniting us."

Dean's target is swing voters--Republican women. He is appealing to their genuine sense of fairness and decency to get them to quit voting for these indecent, manipulative, racist republicans.

The Democrats could try to work those middle of the road voters or getting non-voters to the polls, but we would be foolish to ignore the double-gain of taking a voter from the "R" column and putting them in the "D" column.

There are other great issues to go after the female swing voters with:

2. The environment, especially destroying wilderness and species
3. The arbitrary and cocksure way that Bush took us to war

I would especially like to hear women's comments on these voters and this strategy as I have described it.