Word: nixon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...G.O.P. noticed back. Four years later, Nixon rode to victory over Hubert Humphrey partly on the strength of a Southern strategy devised to move the Dixiecrats permanently into the Republican camp. While remaining formally committed to racial equality, Nixon made clear he would go slow on the federal enforcement of voting rights and integration. For his '68 campaign he also recruited prominent Southerners from the Goldwater circle, including South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, an early defector from the Democrats. Meanwhile, under the pressure from the long hot summers of racial riots, the antiwar and black-power movements and the gleefully...
...blooded right, Nixon's defeat that November proved it was pointless to court the centrist vote already seduced by Kennedy. Even before J.F.K. moved into the White House, the New Right began remaking the G.O.P. in its own image. In 1960 Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative, an outline of his beliefs and his game plan for victory that eventually sold 3.5 million copies. For Buchanan, who read it as a student at Georgetown University, it was "our New Testament." Immediately after the election, activist F. Clifton White organized a meeting of 32 businessmen, lawyers, oilmen and bankers...
Very soon they would find it in plain sight. It was race. In 1956, one year after dispatching troops to integrate the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, Eisenhower won 40% of the black vote. But by 1960, despite the civil rights plank agreed to at the Rockefeller meeting, Nixon was already subtly bidding to the white, conservative South. During the campaign, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Atlanta, Nixon resisted advice to make a supportive phone call to King's wife Coretta. A brief call from Kennedy, made at the urging of his advisers, was enough...
...power of money that had its natural home in the Republican Party. Wallace proposed instead a world in which waitresses and factory workers were oppressed by ivy-educated policy wonks and limousine liberals, an elite who crafted busing plans while their own kids went to private schools. Between them, Nixon and Wallace took 57% of the vote...
Reading those numbers, Kevin Phillips, a Nixon campaign aide and architect of the Southern strategy, saw the future, and it worked. In his book The Emerging Republican Majority, he predicted an unbeatable G.O.P. coalition of Southern and Western voters united by their resentment of Northeastern power and their fear of urban blacks. "A new era has begun," he promised. And it had. As Michael Lind points out in his new book Up from Conservatism, after the 1934 congressional elections, the first of the New Deal era, the South had virtually no Republicans in Congress. Now it has more Republicans than...