Appalachia rising

News today that Chip Saltsman, candidate for Republican National Committee chair, is reaping big kudos from his party for passing around a CD containing the song "Barack the Magic Negro":

The controversy surrounding a comedy CD distributed by Republican National Committee chairman candidate Chip Saltsman has not torpedoed his bid and might have inadvertently helped it.

Four days after news broke that the former Tennessee GOP chairman had sent a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the RNC members he is courting, some of those officials are rallying around the embattled Saltsman...

“Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C.” the opening of the song goes. “The L.A. Times, they called him that ‘cause he’s not authentic like me. Yeah, the guy from the L.A. paper said he makes guilty whites feel good. They’ll vote for him, and not for me, ‘cause he’s not from the 'hood.”

The song, written shortly after the publication of the Times column, was first played on the Rush Limbaugh radio show.

Josh Marshall sums it up:

The Republican party has decided on the racial joke issue as the vehicle to reintroduce themselves to the American people after the 2008 blow out. Am I missing something?

No, Josh, you're not. In the 2008 election, the Republicans basically chucked everything in favor of an ethnic appeal to Southern and rural whites. That resulted in them losing ground in every region of the country except Appalachia.

The Saltsman flap shows that the 2008 strategy is still in place. Until they think of something better than white tribalism, the Republicans will probably go with that, since it'll keep them from disintegrating into complete irrelevance now that their economic and foreign policy programs have utterly crashed and burned. Which means that states like Tennessee, and Appalachian politicians like Saltsman, will have relatively more weight in a party that increasingly depends on the anti-black resentment of poor whites in the rural interior South.