Brad DeLong has been on fire of late. Without much context, I present to you my favorite paragraph of the week (from this very worthwhile post):

…if you had told any Republican in 1980 that 2008 would see (a) a Negro with an Arabic-Swahili name beating a veteran figher pilot in the presidential polls and (b) gay marriage as the big cultural issue of the day, said Republican would have blown several gaskets. And if you had said that this would have been the result of an “Age of Reagan” said Republican would have melted down completely.

Reagan-worship has always struck me as a strange thing. Though his presidency perhaps hastened the end of the Cold War, and though many people found his sunny bromides inspiring, my memories of the end of his administration are dominated by the disgrace over Iran-Contra, with the president coming off as either a senile grandparent or a mendacious schemer.

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…