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Lee Atwater, you're probably not old enough to know that name, but I am, and I was thinking about Atwater all weekend.

Lee Atwater was a Republican strategist. He worked for Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush.

And for, I don't know, a dozen years or more, he was the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

So I am not a fan of Lee Otwaters, needless to say.

But I did appreciate Atwater's bluntness and his honesty in an interview he gave to a political scientist named Alexander

Lamas, who was writing a book about racism and American politics. It was an interview that was

supposed to remain forever anonymous. It was supposed to be on background, not quoted, or attributed

to Atwater. But it leaked. Leaks. They're not a new thing. They're a thing that have been going on

forever.

Anyway, here's what Atwater, the man who ran the GOP for a very long time, the man who helped elect Ronald fucking Reagan had to say about the Southern strategy. The GOPs appeal

to racist white southerners who abandoned the Democratic Party in droves after the civil

rights legislation of the 1960s, signed into law by a Democratic president. Atwater, you start out in 1954 by saying, N-Word, N-Ward, N-Wan. Atwater didn't say N-Ward in the interview. I'm going to say N-word here, as I quote him. By 1968, you can't say N-Word anymore, that hurts you, backfires. So you start

saying stuff like forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now

in the 80s, you're talking about cutting taxes and all these things you're talking about are

totally economic things. And a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.

You follow me? Because obviously sitting around saying, we want to cut this is much more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell

of a lot more abstract than N-word and word. Outwater gave that interview in 1981 when he was

working in Reagan's White House, crafting

those racist abstractions, winning the votes of white people by advancing economic policies

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