jack the knife wrote:Memphis Trace wrote:Memphis Trace wrote:Thank goodness Alabama noticed it was missing... before they struck out. They hit a home run Tuesday.
Memphis Trace
There was no better place than Alabama https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions … amp;wpmm=1
An excerpt:
First, let us pay tribute to the new Alabama busy being born. There were many reasons Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore, but younger voters who insisted that the old ways are not their ways were decisive.
Jones overwhelmed Moore among Alabamians younger than 45, taking more than 60 percent of their ballots, according to the exit polls. Moore took about three-fifths of those 65 and older. This augurs poorly for Republicans, and President Trump is deepening this generation gap. The GOP is throwing away its future.
Memphis Trace
I'm afraid it's much too early to consider Alabama being "reborn." Moore was a terrible candidate, not only for his outlandish views, but for his contempt for the law and his likely criminal behavior. Yet he got a huge support from white men and a large majority from white women. In the next election, Jones will probably lose to a more "normal" opponent. So, though I'm gratified that enough white support could align with African Americans to give Moore the win in this reddest of red states (while many Alabama Republicans stayed home in disgust of their candidate), this will most probably be a short-lived victory.
The heartening thing for me is that the Democrats were smart enough to pour added effort and resources into galvanizing the young, the black, and other minority voters. Trump, Bannon, and Moore cooperated by being great recruiters for getting out the minority vote; and giving pause to enough white mothers and fathers of underaged daughters to stay home instead of voting for Moore.
For the 2018 elections and beyond, I think it is up to progressives to excite and build a coalition of the young people, blacks, Latino, other-immigrant Americans, feminist, LBGT, pro-choice, environmentalist, old hippie, etc., and leave the white fundamentalist Christians to reap their rewards in the next life.
By many estimates, America will become a majority-minority country by mid-century. https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politi … story.html Trump and cohorts have given progressives the perfect storm for electorally defeating the racist and sexist Atwater Republicanism that infects the South and the hills and hollers of PA, MI, and Wi https://www.thenation.com/article/exclu … -strategy/ . An excerpt:
It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Now, the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, James Carter IV, has dug up the entire forty-two-minute interview from which that quote derives. Here, The Nation publishes it in its entirety for the very first time.
Memphis Trace
