Calling the Republicans out on their values

Josh Marshall says what Democrats need to get used to saying:

Again, let's be honest with ourselves. Racism is one of the key building blocks of Republican politics in the United States. Don't look at me with a straight face and tell me you don't realize that's true. That doesn't mean that all Republicans are racists. Far from it. It doesn't mean that a lot of Republicans don't wish the stain wasn't part of their party's recent political heritage. They do. But racism and race-baiting is the hold card Republicans take into every election. When times are good, guys like Mehlman 'reach out' to blacks and Latinos to try to take the edge off their opposition to the Republican officeholders. But when things get rough the card gets played. And pretty much every time.

I actually believed and hoped during the 1990s that the old segregationist, white-supremacist mentality had somehow been decisively banished from the mainstream, or at least was about to be. It obviously hadn't gone away. Not with Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond two of the most prominent faces in the Republican Senate, and Rush Limbaugh one of the most prominent Republican commentators. It's just that I thought it was well on the way to being sidelined, even in the Republican Party.

What-was-I-thinking? The crass race-baiting ads the Reps are using against Harold Ford in Tennessee are only a reflection of the neosegregationist mentality on which today's Republican Party operates. And it is the Christian Right, the single most important base voting block for the Republicans, who are most interested in keeping it that way, and even to take the Party further in that direction.

And I might not quite have phrased it the way he does. But I agree with Marshall's instinct that Democrats should use the Republicans' many episodes of letting their core "angry white man" show to remind everyone what their party is about:

The point is that as vile as this race-hucksterism is, for my part I welcome the opportunity that Republican desperation provides, to show these guys for who they really are. Scratch the surface of 'outreach' Mehlman and he's a Southern strategy man after all. So, fine, bring it on. Cut away the veil and the mask. Let everyone come out from under their rock and be who they really are.

Let them lose their majorities and their souls.

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