I can't tell whether South Carolina U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham was speaking plainly or criticizing his party's tin ear when he said yesterday, "We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term." The Washington Post puts this in context:
Exit polls from 2008 showed that 90 percent of GOP voters were white, a homogeneity that has been consistent for more than 30 years, even as the percentage of the electorate that is white has fallen.
Nonwhite voters favored Obama over Romney by better than three to one in a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll from early August; 74 percent of Latino voters and 90 percent of African Americans backed Obama.
And despite a speaker lineup in Tampa that includes Artur Davis, a black former Democratic congressman; former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; and Utah congressional candidate Mia Love, who would be the party’s first black congresswoman if she won in November, just 2 percent of convention delegates are black.
That’s according to an analysis by David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Bositis also said that only two members of the 165-member RNC are black and that none of the leaders of the committees responsible for drafting the GOP platform and adopting the convention rules are black.
“This Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off,” he said.
This couldn't have anything to do with the party's takeover by its loony right fringe, could it? Or the predictable outcome of Nixon's and Reagan's Southern strategy? Nah.