"Southern Discomfort" By David Weigel at Slate

[applegrove]

Southern Discomfort

By David Weigel at Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/08/republican_voter_id_initiatives_are_making_it_hard_to_rebrand_the_gop_as.html

"SNIP.............................


Nobody said rebranding would be easy, but this is excruciating. National Republicans want to win black voters, and to let it be known that those voters are welcome on Team Reagan. “Shaking black hands and kissing black babies would reassure nervous white voters that Republicans are not bigots,” wrote the black conservative pundit Deroy Murdock this year.

If only the Republicans who’ve won power in red states would go along with it. When the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a trove of mostly Southern counties no longer had to clear their electoral laws and maps with the Justice Department. The result: voter ID laws freed from limbo in Mississippi and South Carolina, new bills passed in Texas and North Carolina, and denunciations from the NAACP. All this while the Republican National Committee continues to campaign in court against an old consent decree that prevents either party from launching “ballot security” programs without notice.

“Republicans have not always been savvy about making these arguments,” says Artur Davis, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who switched parties in 2012, campaigned for Mitt Romney, and backs voter ID laws. “The voter ID movement has been damaged by extremists who argue that Obama somehow stole both elections, or clowns like the Pennsylvania legislator who bragged with no evidence to support the notion that a voter ID law would kill Democrats in Pennsylvania.”

There’s no question that the clowns hurt the cause. In theory, and in most polls, up to 80 percent of voters in any state back voter ID. In Pennsylvania, as the controversy over the state’s rushed law mounted and the commonwealth fought off a lawsuit, support dipped to a bare majority. Worse, for Republicans: Anger over voter ID and restricted early-voting times galvanized black voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. I saw it anecdotally in 2012, when I interviewed pastors getting ready to lead early-vote drives or stepped through swollen, mostly black lines of early voters in Ohio’s cities. Florida’s organizers called it “Operation Lemonade” (as in “when life gives you lemons”), and they drove up black turnout when Republicans were sure it would teeter.


............................SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Rehistory: black turnout in reaction to voter suppression being branded as proof

black voting rights are secure. How disgusting. They cause something to happen (black anger at being disenfranchised) and then get people to judge the victims on it to suit their narrative. Psychopathic.