Republican Southern Strategy: Lee Atwater

I've heard this story for years, and Republicans have always claimed it was apocryphal. Now the tape of the interview has been made public, and Atwater did indeed say these things. He was being interviewed in 1981 by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. The interview was scholarly, not political. Say it, Brother Lee:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”