The most dramatic reversal in the pattern of electoral maps in US history between two presidential elections separated by just 8 years.
What possible reason could account for that???
Yesterday, Rachel Maddow did a segment "We Can Fact-Check, Gov. Barbor", which I think astutely recognized at least one part of an unfolding dynamic: It's not just Glenn Beck, there's a expanding effort to pull a Karl Rove against Obama, and re-position the Republicans as the post-racial party, as illustrated by an interview that Haley Barbour did with Human Events in which he tried to portary himself as part of the first generation of South--Republican's, natch!--who grew up with integration and experienced it as no big deal.
Of course, Barbour was lying through his teeth. Integration was barely getting started when he was in college, and he placed his own children in private academies that were all-white until the last year his eldest son was in attendence. Her guest, Eugene Robinson, outdid himself, and even pointed out the unusual nature of the 1964 election in which Goldwater, who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, only carried five Deep South states plus his native Arizona. But he didn't bring the full weight of this fact to bear, which I think can only be gained by comparing the 1964 map with the 1956 map. The 1956 map was the most stripped-down version of the Democratic "Solid South" which can be found from 1876 onward (except for the Dixiecrat Revolt eleciton of 1948). And the 1964 map, just 8 years later, was an almost exact mirror image. Taken together, the two maps are perhaps the most dramatic representation of the overwhelming power of race in American politics you will ever find.
As the Republicans struggle mightily in the next two years to eradicate that history, we progressives would do very well to start amassing such images, particularly campaign ads, that can--at a single glance--bring the past that Republicans desperately want to eradicate, replace and re-write--vividly to life.
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