honestly i think this may have been the most racist campaign ever. [View all]

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well, i can't really speak about the pre-/post civil war era, but at least in the last 50 years and perhaps as far back as around 1890 or so.

just about everything the rmoney campaign did seemed to be designed to make people vote on the basis of bigotry.

republicans have long included dog whistles in their campaigns, but it reached a fever pitch in this election.

i think it's fair to lump in his dearth of policy specifics. challengers who want a mandate to change from the status quo invariably propose specifics to motivate their troops and build the argument against the "default" action, which is staying the course. reagan famously did this against carter and reagan's their idol. i think a large part of rmoney's lack of specifics was designed to leave no basis on which to vote other than bigotry.

you might say that, no, surely he was just trying to capitalize on the discontent with the economy, but no, if that were the case he would say exactly what he would do differently. and he really didn't. he danced around that area as politicians do, but he neither listed clear-cut specifics nor did he distill his program into a few simple points that he highlighted prominently during the campaign.