I’ve always found it apt when the everyman supporters of a political movement are called “the base”. As a coastal elitist snob, I often heap scorn on the base elements of our society which also happen to be the bases of both parties—indeed, the bases of all successful parties in a democracy.

For a democracy to properly function, however, the base base must not be agitated with populism and demagoguery. If it is, ugliness ensues and democracy is threatened. Witness this WaPo report:

Worse, Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Sow the seeds of discord, reap the whirlwind. Something like that.

Here’s Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve.

It might be that I’m still sick today (and have been for almost a week now), but I found Maureen Dowd’s column today to be wonderfully savage. The object of her derision is no surprise: Hillary.

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

…

She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?

Yeah, I have no love for Clinton either. But another detail in the piece did make me prick up my ears:

When Hillary hecklers yelled “Iron my shirt!” at her in Salem on Monday, it stirred sisterhood.

Not just sisterhood—that kind of shit gets even my cynical back up. Can you imagine hecklers at an Obama rally yelling “pick my cotton!” at him while he tries to speak? The truth of the matter is that nasty public sexism like that is tolerated whereas public displays of racism, at least at an Obama rally, would probably get the perpetrators properly beat up.

Though I’m not making an argument for electing Clinton based on her gender, I certainly can see more clearly why she might have seen an uptick in support in the last moments of the New Hampshire race.

Senator Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) gave an empassioned defense of Trent Lott on the Senate floor today.

Pithiest commentary of the day comes from David Kurtz over at TPM:

For my money, this is the best part of Sen. Gordon’s [*sic.*] defense of Trent Lott’s Strom Thurmond homage:

“We knew what he meant.”

Who’s we? And what did he mean?

Well played, sir.

This is completely not work safe. But when you have a moment to yourself, you have to watch it.

It is the best Onion video piece I’ve seen. Many of their other attempts feel like they’re Onion print articles made into video features. This one is written for the medium. Perfect.

Edit: I had it inlined, but the static image was not family-friendly. And this is a family blog, after all.

I haven’t been a political junkie for long enough to actually remember Lee Atwater as a personality. I’ve heard him mentioned posthumously in hushed tones, as if not to wake him from his eternal slumber. Karl Rove has been compared to him, but most commentators admit that Rove was but a pale shade of his predecessor.

So it was not without some interest that I read this supposedly famous exchange with the man (via Brad DeLong):

*Atwater:* As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…

*Questioner:* But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?

*Atwater:* 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 [that] 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. 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.’

The only more jarring thing than the “performance” itself is that he would be making such brazen and damning statements in the first place. Is it the hubristic pride of being the ultimate partisan ‘fixer’ that would lead him to assume that making statements such as these would be a good idea?

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to have much hurt the Republicans at all…