The Fee Hand of the Political Market 0
Jay Bookman wonders why the message of the market doesn’t resonate with the Republican Party:
But Mitt Romney, for all his faults, is not the problem. His campaign team is not the problem. . . .
The problem is not the salesman. The problem is the product that he is attempting to peddle.
Remember, if they lose again this year, the Republican presidential candidate will have won a plurality of votes just once in the last six cycles, dating all the way back to 1992. That sole victory was itself an historic anomaly, with George W. Bush riding the patriotic post-9/11 wave to a very narrow two-point margin over John Kerry in 2004. The market is trying to tell them something.
Two words explain the falling value of the GOP’s stock: Southern. Strategy.
They are running out of bigots.
Afterthought:
Not long ago, I saw a vehicle with one of those “Don’t Re-Nig” bumper stickers. “Okay,” I said to myself, “a racist.”
The racist part did not surprise me. The advertising-the-racism did, mildly. Generally, even racists try to hide it in public these days, and the bumper sticker is somewhat more overt than the more common act of plastering the vehicle with the stars and bars.
Recently, a reader of Leonard Pitts, Jr., also saw one of those bumper stickers and wrote Mr. Pitts about it. Pitts addressed it in his column. A snippet:
But they do not lie for our benefit. They lie to conscience — and to self.
