Our Political Myths

For John, BLUF:  History is often written in the hedlines, with no one going back to double check the story.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The myth of a Southern Strategy

From donsurber substack, by Reporter Don Surber, 10 March 2023.

Here is the lede plus four:

Richard Nixon was the most maligned president in U.S. history until Donald Trump came along. Democrats still hate Nixon because he opposed communists in America early and often. He knew Moscow funded the American Communist Party four decades before the press admitted it — and only after the Soviet Union fell did the press report it.

Watergate was a frame up. He never knew about the plan to bug the DNC. But he had passed Mark Felt over as J. Edgar Hoover’s successor at the FBI, and so the deep state removed Nixon from office less than two years after his record landslide re-election.

The same press that created Watergate has defended Obama using the FBI to spy on President Trump. The press still insists there was a Russiagate that allowed a Democrat to use the government to spy on a Republican critic.

The biggest lie against Nixon was a Southern Strategy. I will allow the Washington Post to define it.

The Post said on July 26, 2019, “Most Americans have heard the story of the Southern strategy: The Republican Party, in the wake of the civil rights movement, decided to court Southern white voters by capitalizing on their racial fears. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater first wielded this strategy in 1964 and Richard Nixon perfected it in 1968 and 1972, turning the solidly Democratic South into a bastion of Republicanism.”

Here are the numberss, which should tell us a story:

[Nixon] took 5 of the 6 Confederate states that LBJ took in his landslide.

And LBJ is the man who passed, with the help of the Republicans, the Civil Rights legislation.

Sure, four years later, Nixon took all 11 Confederate states. But he also took every other state in the country except Massachusetts. If you want to call that a Southern Strategy then your south extends to Alaska.

Why wass Massachusetts the odd man out?

Jimmy Carter would take 10 of those 11 states back four years later. And of course Clinton and Gore did well in the Confederate states. Were they dog whistling Dixie?

Yes, it appears that President Richard Nixon was smeaared regarding his so-called Southern Strategy.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff