Welcome To 1890

One reason the general election campaign (no matter who the GOP nominee is) will probably be more interesting as well as a substantial relief, according to Timothy Egan:

There is no other way to put this without resorting to demographic bluntness: the small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large.

None of that is a surprise. But when you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States. They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.

Georgia! Georgia!

In an article entitled "Deconstructing a Demagogue," Timothy Egan reports that Newt Gringrich's insults come straight a playbook he wrote back when he mattered:

Back in 1994, while plotting his takeover of the House, Gingrich circulated a memo on how to use words as a weapon. It was called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Republicans were advised to use certain words in describing opponents — sick, pathetic, lie, decay, failure, destroy. That was the year, of course, when Gingrich showed there was no floor to his descent into a dignity-free zone, equating Democratic Party values with the drowning of two young children by their mother, Susan Smith, in South Carolina.

Today, if you listen carefully to any Gingrich takedown, you’ll usually hear words from the control memo.

He even used them, as former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams wrote in National Review Online this week, in going after President Reagan, calling him “pathetically incompetent,” as Abrams reported. And he compared Reagan’s meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

Egan has no doubt that Gingrich is intentionally using racially provocative language:

It was Gingrich, even before Donald Trump, who tried to define the president as someone who is not American — “Kenyan, anti-colonial.” And there he was earlier this week, pumped by a big audience in Sarasota, Fla., reflecting back at him these projected fears. When he said he wanted to send President Obama back to Chicago, the crowd took up a chant of “Kenya! Kenya!”

Calling Obama “the best food stamp president ever” is a clear play on racial fears. In the crash of the last year of George W. Bush’s administration, food stamp use surged, but Gingrich would never associate a white Texan president with dependency.

For The Love Of Mike

Alarmed by Mike Huckabee's supergaffe about Barack Obama and his reckless parole policies when he was Arkansas governor, Timothy Egan suggests he keep his job at Fox News and skip running for president in 2012. Andrew Sullivan doesn't like Huckabee's recent statements, either, but he's afraid that if he doesn't run, he'll leaves the far-right (aka the GOP nomination) to Sarah Palin.