Libidiot psychobabble:
Racist, Distorted and Effective

Posted on Nov 1, 2007
By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—A contemporary Willie Horton has turned up in the Democratic presidential campaign, and so far he is winning. No such person sat in the Drexel University auditorium during the Democrats’ debate on Tuesday night. But the candidates, especially the unprepared front-runner, Hillary Clinton, should long ago have recognized that Republicans and a shrill conservative chorus intend to make Hispanic illegal immigrants the Willie Hortons of 2008.

Horton, an African-American, was the poster child of the 1988 presidential campaign. He was a convicted murderer given a weekend furlough from prison during the administration of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee. Horton did not return, and 10 months later he raped a Maryland woman and brutally assaulted her fiance. Republican mastermind Lee Atwater, political godfather of today’s Karl Rove, used Horton to play on the fear and racial animosity that so often are great motivators of the American electorate.

The Horton ad campaign conducted on behalf of George H.W. Bush’s candidacy was decried as racist and distorted. But it worked. And it became emblematic of how to run a devastatingly effective negative campaign.

The current Republican war on illegal immigrants could be as potent a wedge issue as race and crime were in the 1980s. It exploits peoples’ fear that invading waves of Hispanics—you never hear anyone talk about building a fence along the Canadian border, or rounding up Eastern Europeans who’ve slipped in—are overrunning neighborhoods and schools, robbing legitimate workers of jobs and somehow diminishing the American dream.

It is not only that Clinton was caught flatfooted and evasive during the debate when she was asked if she supported New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to grant driver’s licenses to the undocumented. It’s that other candidates are buying into the dangerous premise that they, too, must talk tough on immigrants. Chris Dodd piously announced that obtaining a driver’s license is a “privilege,â€