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In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House. He did it in a shameful way -- by dividing Americans against one another, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people.
They called it the "Southern Strategy," and the Republicans have been using it ever since. Nixon pioneered it, and Ronald Reagan perfected it, using phrases like "racial quotas" and "welfare queens" to convince white Americans that minorities were to blame for all of America's problems.
The Republican Party would never win elections if they came out and said their core agenda was about selling America piece by piece to their campaign contributors and making sure that wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few.
To distract people from their real agenda, they run elections based on race, dividing us, instead of uniting us.
But these politics do worse than that -- they fracture the very soul of who we are as a country.
------ Howard Dean
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