The Grand Old Party Hates This Republican, But Lee Atwater Would Have Loved Him

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Thursday, March 03, 2016

EDITORIAL

Let’s see if we can get this straight. The Republican party has a self-funding, businessman candidate that has performed better in the primary cycle to this point than any candidate in decades.

But, the Republican Party -- the "Grand Old Party" --  hates him. 

GOP members such as former GOP Governor of New Jersey Christine Todd Whitman and GOP Governor of Massachusetts Charlie Baker are all pledging to never support this new Republican.

Donald Trump, who has created excitement, driven primary turnout to record level, and may have brought the white, male Ronald Reagan voting Democrats back over to the GOP, is now being characterized by many of the leading members of the GOP as a brute, a racist and a demagogue.

GOP History Lesson

This is same GOP that stood by when Lee Atwater pressed the race button in South Carolina to help Reagan win the primary in 1980. “Atwater was honing his chops that year by leaking a rumor that former Texas Governor John Connally was trying to buy black votes. And that was how the South Carolina Republican primary was born,” according to a recent feature in Esquire magazine.  

RESULT: Victory GOP and Reagan

Again in 1988, Atwater and the GOP was at it again. This time for George H. W. Bush in the presidential race against Michael Dukakis. 

“Mr. Dukakis was the target of a campaign advertisement about Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who escaped from the Massachusetts prison system while on a weekend furlough and raped a white woman and stabbed her husband. The advertisement became a central focus of the 1988 campaign. ‘In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate,'  Mr. Atwater said in the Life article,” wrote the New York Times in Atwaters’ obituary.

RESULT: Victory GOP and Bush

We should not forget George W. Bush and the GOP using robocalls about challenger John McCain’s adopted daughter from the slums of India in the South Carolina primary in 2000. This time Atwater had been replaced by Karl Rove, but the GOP tactics were the same. 

Primary voters were asked, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"

RESULT: Victory GOP and Bush

The GOP of Reagan and the Bush family should not now repudiate Trump. The GOP should embrace this new Republican for learning the lessons faster and more efficiently without Atwater and Rove by his side than his predecessors.

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