And what Romney is doing works on many people. I was helping a senior citizen with a computer problem this past week when the election came up. Briefly she felt that Obama (???) or maybe the democrats were responsible for women having children out of wedlock so the government would pay them. (in 2012 yet) Her feelings were so strong it amazed me. It goes back to Reagan's fictional Cadillac mom. The idea that having children to get paid is bizarre on the face of it even if some children born into that situation did receive sustenance. Do people do stupid things like having children out of wedlock, and then end up homeless or support-less, of course, but is this today, a reason to vote for Romney strikes me as absurd. Civil rights are still being fought out in the minds of many.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/opinion/blow-the-gops-black-people-platform.html
'Kevin Phillips, who popularized the right’s 'Southern Strategy,' was quoted in The New York Times Magazine in May 1970 as saying that "the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.""
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. 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 “Nigger, nigger.” Lee Atwater, Republican strategist, 1981, describing the Southern Strategy
