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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Fair enough. Willie Horton was some rancid shit, but that was more Atwater than anything else. Bush 41's record on race matters was otherwise decent. (Even crediting his wife's dumb comments on Katrina to him.)
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As that article explains, Bush talked about Horton on the stump for months before the ad was made. You are so uncomfortable calling someone a racist that you are unwilling to call them a racist when they go in front of large crowds repeatedly to say racist shit, and then pay employees to turn it into a TV commercial. From what I can tell, you are unwilling to call someone a racist unless they go and say bluntly, I am a racist. (Then you think they deserve the label for being so déclassé as to admit it openly.)
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But generally, old line GOP voters simply did not pay attention to matters of race or sex. They were pocketbook voters.
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Yes, it's a total mystery why Bush talked about Horton on the stump, or Atwater and Ailes ran those ads -- all those pocketbook voters were just ignoring the fact that Horton was black, and the ads didn't really explain how he was going to prevent them from fully deducting their business expenses.
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Call them clueless, criticize them for their ignorance -- that's all fair. But my fucking 90 year old grandparents who only voted R because they had a business and that's what you did when you had a business back then weren't racists. They were just people who figured it was always better to pay less in taxes. They'd have never voted for someone like Trump (because they were Eastern European immigrants who knew what demagogues looked like).
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So that we can have a more useful conversation about this, I am willing to stipulate that NOTHING I say about anyone, at any time, has anything to do with your grandparents unless I explicitly say so, or unless I say something nice, however unlikely that is.
