From the Department of Unheard Dog Whistles
In the New York Times on Monday, pollster Stan Greenberg bade farewell to the infamous “Reagan Democrats” of Macomb County in Michigan:
For more than 20 years, the non-college-educated white voters in Macomb County have been considered a “national political barometer,” as Ronald Brownstein of National Journal described them during the Democratic convention in August. After Ronald Reagan won the county by a 2-to-1 margin in 1984, Mr. Brownstein noted, I conducted focus groups that “found that these working-class whites interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African-Americans.”
I’m sure that the oh-so-honorable McCain campaign had no awareness of this when they ran this ad in the final week of the presidential campaign:
It’s not much of a mystery what unspoken attitudes Team McCain was hoping to evoke with that “JUST LIKE YOU SUSPECTED” line, is it?
I wonder if Mr. “Country First” was sad on election night that the racist vote didn’t come through for him, that many of them finally realized there was something more important than skin color of when it came to presidential candidates.
Stumble it!
