Southern Strategy

In 2009 Obama put country above party.  Bringing health security to over 30 million Americans and laying the foundation for a major restructuring of our health system were sufficient rewards for him to accept the political risks.

Author and legal scholar, Michelle Alexander, has written a powerful and highly acclaimed, well-researched book titled, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

Southern Democracy -- recently purged of moderate-to-conservative leaders, facing the rumored forfeiture of white working class voters, and banking on college-educated professionals and poor minorities -- cannot continue as a competitive force.

Fundamentally, we are looking at a transformed Southern political system dominated by the Republican Party, particularly in the deep South. Southern Democrats would be well-served to do some sober thinking about their predicament in a still-reddening political environment.

An organization that always turns right can only move in circles, or more accurately, in an ever tightening spiral. Rule and Ruin aims to explain how the GOP came to be drawn into its accelerating tornado of extremism.

Driving the right wing's flight into irrationality is the fear of complexity. In place of it, the right wants to substitute radically simplified fictions, whether about history, or about climate change, homosexuality or the debt ceiling.

Republican overreach is in the air. You can see it, smell it, taste it everywhere, as you have in years past. And the only surprise is that is that it happened so quickly this time around.

While we are indeed currently politically divided and somewhat polarized, this is actually our normal state as a nation -- and on the polarization scale, we're nowhere near the "most divided" we've ever been. Far from it.

To quote the President, and to understate it greatly, I feel bad about what happened Tuesday. Yet official exit polls reveal a few warnings for Repub...

The target may differ, but the Republican tactic is always the same: demonize a group of human beings based on what sets them apart -- skin color, religion, sexual orientation -- and make them objects of derision.

We have intercepted an interoffice memo between RNC and the Hall of Just Us. It reveals the Republicans' Six-Point Plan for Regaining Power!

What else do we call the deliberate inciting of racial bigotry and resentment for the sake of attaining power? It's race-baiting and it's a major component of the Republican strategic arsenal.

When presented with viable options to fix our problems, there is this tendency for America to take the road to ruin. why does America allow dysfunctional politics to result in horrible, even suicidal policies?

Sarah Palin is and was a Southern Strategist. So it's with considerable hilarity that I read her latest Facebook remarks in which she insisted there isn't a racial component to the various tea party groups.

Denying the long-standing link between white tribalism and conservatism may be "politically correct" within the DC bubble where press and politicians mingle, but denial is the opposite of truth.

Republicans will readily admit that trying to win over black voters has been a lost cause since LBJ, so why not exploit that loss by playing to white racial bias and thus locking down larger chunks of the white vote?

When you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that's left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race. This isn't an epiphany by any stretch.

If history is the best predictor of the future, and it usually is, the "Tea Party" will have a short shelf life. Beginning well before the Civil War, such movements have come and gone.

Southern Republicans have been able to effectively use cultural issues to their advantage because the Democrats usually don't bother to stand their ground.