1994-2009.thumbnail.JPGSo much of DC politicking over the last few years has been centered around the idea that if Democrats actually act like Democrats, they’ll lose their seats "just like they did in 1994".  Guess what?  It’s not 1994, chronologically, culturally or demographically.

For one thing, Republican favorability stinks right now.  Democratic fave ratings may be dropping slightly — which one would expect to see after the post-election highs — but Republicans are breaking through the floor.  This after two solid years of demonizing Democrats and especially Barack Obama.  Result?  He’s now President Obama.  Smooth move, guys.

For another thing, guess where the favorability ratings for Republicans are dropping the hardest?  That’s right, among non-whites, most especially Latinos.  

Remember when Latinos were going to be the new Republican base?  The GOP was banging the culture-war drum and the anti-choice drum to woo Hispanics and other Latinos.   But that plan ran up against the GOP’s longstanding Prime Directive, otherwise known as "the Southern Strategy".  You know, the one where tax cuts for Big Business and the rich are justified by saying  "you don’t want that money going to colored people, do you? ‘Cuz that’s who the government’s spending it on!"  

The Southern Strategy is an old, old Prime Directive.  It’s not only how the GOP ditched its "Party of Lincoln" heritage to win over the South in the late 1960s and 1970s, it’s also how they’re won the White House for most of the past four decades.  Read Reagan campaign strategist Lee Atwater’s 1981 comments on saying "taxes" as a code word (or "abstraction") for "nigg-r" and justifying cutting taxes with the idea that doing so hurts blacks (and Latinos) far worse than whites. 

The GOP’s loss of Hispanics can be encapsulated in the political career of Loretta Sanchez.  She began her political career as a moderate Republican, but couldn’t get anywhere as one, so she switched parties to take on the ineffably wacky"B-1 Bob" Dornan in 1996 — and beat him.  (He took the loss so hard he had to almost literally be hauled out of his Capitol Hill office.)   She’s part of the Republican-emulating, corporate-worshiping Blue Dog Coalition, but has been differing with the BD’s leadership on key issues, most notably on health care reform — where she supports a strong public option and they don’t.

Playing to (and worse, coddling and encouraging) the racism of whites, especially Southern whites,  for the past three generations has now locked the Republicans in a Hobson’s Choice:  They can either appeal to a rabid hardcore white base, or they can try to woo non-white voters, but they cannot do both.   They just can’t.

One of the more amusing reads I’ve had lately is Republican strategist Bill Greener’s Salon piece.   In it, he laments that a) white non-Hispanics have dropped from 90% of voters in 1976 to only 75% in 2008, and b) non-white voters in general hate Republicans more than ever — but fails to mention the GOP’s role in making non-whites hate the GOP, and why the GOP’s wedding of low taxes to race hatred make it impossible for them to be more inclusive of people who aren’t white.  (Worse yet, the GOP’s movers and shakers have been steeped in their own foul Southern-Strategy brew for so long that they can’t help but be racists themselves, as they keep proving over and over again.)  

Sow the corporate-racist wind, reap the electoral-defeat whirlwind.   Blue Dogs, take note, lest you wind up like the Republicans.  Loretta Sanchez has noticed — it’s about time your leadership does, too.