The GOP’s Big City Scare Tactics

Peter Slevin: “It is a repeat of an old Republican gambit: when in doubt, scare people, particularly white people. At the heart of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy was his effort to brand himself as the ‘law and order’ candidate, a title that Trump later adopted for himself. Alongside images of urban riots and protests against the Vietnam War, Nixon declared, in the voice-over to a 1968 campaign ad, that freedom from violence is ‘the first civil right of every American.'”

“Twenty years later, George H. W. Bush accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime, spotlighting the case of Willie Horton, a Black inmate who raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend while on furlough. The Bush campaign strategist Lee Atwater said that he would ‘strip the bark off the little bastard’—meaning Dukakis—and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate.’ Three years later, as Atwater was dying of cancer, at thirty-nine, he apologized to Dukakis for the ‘naked cruelty’ of his remark.”

“Across the country, Democratic candidates have been demonized on crime this campaign cycle.”