The Short Road From Lee Atwater to Paul Ryan

I haven’t had time to listen to the whole thing, but The Nation has an audio of the infamous Lee Atwater interview from 1981 in which he explained the Southern Strategy:

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, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Fast forward — Now Paul Ryan is saying that he and Mittens did not lose the election because voters rejected his policies. They lost the election because of all those “urban” voters.

I think he needs to get a lot more abstract.