52% of Americans in favor of soaking the rich.

[derspiess]

i don't think many people criticize welfare because it helps blacks. most people i see criticizing welfare do so because it helps poor people.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.

Lee Atwater, Republican strategist.

Atwater said & did some strange things.  Like converting to Catholicism.

[Razgovory]

Yes, I think it still applies.  When you have a Republican senator running for President and saying he doesn't want to make black people's lives better by giving them someone Else's money, I think the old narratives apply.

To be clear: do you think Republicans are continuing to pursue a "southern strategy" in 2015 whereby they use coded policies and terminology to appeal for people's votes based on racism?

If so, how do you reconcile that belief with what Atwater himself had to say about Reagan's 1980 campaign?

I am.  I also reconcile it with him saying Reagain didn't need to do that, not that he was innocent of it.  He certainly did, particularly in his 1976 run where one of his campaign managers was Eugenicist.