...on welfare and food stamps wrapped in mink and driving a Caddie. That racist lie still lingers...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
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In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan made a much-noted appearance at the Neshoba County Fair. His speech there contained the phrase "I believe in states' rights" and was cited as evidence that the Republican Party was building upon the Southern strategy again. Reagan's campaigns used racially coded rhetoric, making attacks on the "welfare state" and leveraging resentment towards affirmative action. Dan Carter explains "Reagan showed that he could use coded language with the best of them, lambasting welfare queens, busing, and affirmative action as the need arose." During his 1976 and 1980 campaigns Reagan employed stereotypes of welfare recipients, often invoking the case of a "welfare queen" with a large house and a Cadillac using multiple names to collect over $150,000 in tax-free income. Aistrup described Reagan's campaign statements as "seemingly race neutral" but explained how whites interpret this in a racial manner, citing a DNC funded study conducted by CRG Communications. Though Reagan did not overtly mention the race of the welfare recipient, the unstated impression in whites' minds were black people and Reagan's rhetoric resonated with Southern white perceptions of black people.
Aistrup argued that one example of Reagan field-testing coded language in the South was a reference to an unscrupulous man using food stamps as a "strapping young buck". Reagan, when informed of the offensive connotations of the term, defended his actions as a nonracial term that was common in his Illinois hometown. Ultimately, Reagan never used that particular phrasing again. According to Ian Haney Lopez the "young buck" term changed into "young fellow" which was less overtly racist. "'Some young fellow' was less overtly racist and so carried less risk of censure, and worked just as well to provoke a sense of white victimization."
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