Politics

Politico Illustrates ‘Race And The Modern GOP’ With Photo Of Democrat George Wallace

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
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Northern Virginia-based news outlet Politico Magazine illustrated a piece entitled “Race and the Modern GOP” with a photograph of Democrat George Wallace standing in the University of Alabama schoolhouse door.

The piece by Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos makes the oft-repeated liberal case that the major parties switched in their commitment to civil rights during the 1964 election between conservative Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrat Lyndon Johnson, and the trend continued during the presidency of Richard Nixon.

“One of the central sources of continuity linking the Republican Party that emerged under Nixon in the late ’60s and early ’70s with the GOP of today is a sustained politics of racial reaction,” McAdam and Kloos wrote.

The piece, featured in the magazine’s “History Dept.” section, did not mention, as The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Jim Antle recently pointed out, that when Republican Richard Nixon left office in 1974 more than 70 percent of Southern schools had been desegregated, up from 10 percent when his predecessor Johnson left office in 1969.

The piece did not mention that Wallace, the Democrat depicted standing in the schoolhouse door in 1963 to symbolically block desegregation, ran for president in the Democratic Party primary as late as 1972 and 1976, and last ran for governor as the nominee of the Democratic Party in 1982. The piece did not include a caption identifying Wallace as a Democrat, though he was referred to as such in the middle of the piece.

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Patrick Howley