Trump Remixed the Republican 'Southern Strategy'
ROBERT P. JONES 8:00 AM ET
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee hired three new staffers to assist with African American outreach. They will have their work cut out for them. Donald Trump’s average level of black support from four recent national polls is 2 percent, and a July NBC/Wall Street Journal battleground poll showed Trump getting exactly 0 percent support among African American voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And the candidate is not helping his own cause. He has demonstrated a steady penchant for resurrecting racially divisive campaign tactics of the past, tactics that simultaneously ignored black voters and used race as a wedge to attract disgruntled white voters in the South ...
One glaring, underreported clue about the method behind the post-primary Trump madness is his selection of Paul Manafort as chair of his national campaign. Manafort’s appointment, followed by the ousting of Corey Lewandowski in June, was widely seen as a move to professionalize Trump’s disorganized campaign staff just ahead of the convention. But along with credentials earned from working with top GOP politicians (and a raft of international dictators from the Philippines to Somalia), Manafort also brought decades of experience as an overseer of the Southern Strategy. Since the 1980s, Manafort’s business partners have included Charles Black, who helped launch the Senate career of outspoken segregationist Jessie Helms, and Lee Atwater, who was behind the infamously racist Willie Horton ads run by the George H. W. Bush campaign.
And it was Manafort who arranged for Ronald Reagan to kick off his post-convention presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964. In his relatively short speech, Reagan declared, “I believe in state’s rights…And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
To the all-white audience at the Neshoba County Fair, still simmering about a host of federal civil rights interventions, the location of the speech and the language of “states’ rights” sent an unmistakable message about restoring an imbalance of power in their favor ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/how-trump-remixed-the-republican-southern-strategy/495719/
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