Paul Krugman's "Bigger Than Bush"

Paul Krugman wrote a great column today about the Republican party:

But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “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 byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.

Its not something we in the political arena think about much these days because it is so coded in cryptic language, but as Krugman points out, the modern Republican party was founded as a party for black and white segregation.

As the years moved move, however, and obvious racism become more and more out of fashion, the racism became subtler and subtler. But those elements are still in the party.

This is one of the major reasons why Barack Obama's election is so important. It does not end racism in America. That is far from over. But what it does is end a period in American history, the history after civil rights until now, where blacks and minorities began the slow climb to equal treatment with whites, but had to fight against a racism that was far subtler but almost as insidious as what those in the past faced.

But the times, they are a changing. We have a smart as-hell, Harvard-educated president. And he just happens to be a black dude.