Hey Nixon/RR/BushInc: How's that Southern Strategy working out for GOP these days?
HOWARD FINEMAN, HUFFINGTON POST: This is the nightmarish other side of the Southern Strategy. Just a little history for a second. The South was Democrat for decades --
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Solid South.
FINEMAN: Solid South. And then the Civil Rights Movement happened, caused a depth charge in the South. Eventually the Republicans, led by Richard Nixon, saw the chance to take the South from the Democrats and make the South the base of a new Republican party. And that, in fact, has been the case consistently from the late '60s and early '70s through to today pretty much except for places like Virginia and North Carolina, occasionally around the perimeter, the solid South of the Republicans. And in the old days, it used to be considered almost shrewd that they would play to the edges of this.
Ronald Reagan in 1980, one of the first campaign stops of the fall of 1980 for Ronald Reagan was at the county fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, right down the road from where some civil rights workers had been killed. That symbolism was not lost on anybody in the South. That was dog whistle politics, that was fog horn politics. People called him on it at the time. But that's 30 years ago in American politics. We are a different country, we are a multicultural country. We are a country of many races, not just the black/white story. And the Southern Strategy is now coming to haunt the Republicans. And if they don't find a way to disengage themselves from it, they've got no way of winning a presidential election, none.
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/23/howard_fineman_southern_strategy_used_by_nixon_reagan_coming_back_to_haunt_republicans.html
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