Gingrich’s Race Triangulating: South Carolina Edition

I saw what you did there, Newt:

Newt Gingrich veered off the traditional GOP primary campaign trail Saturday for an African-American church — and a colloquy on race relations and urban policy that only seemed to strengthen the audience’s resolve to vote for Barack Obama.

Far from where his rivals spent their time just a week before the make-or-break primary in the state — and from where many likely Republican voters can be found — the former House speaker chose to spend his afternoon in front of a hostile audience at the Jones Memorial AME Church.

This smells like triangulation to me. Especially since it occurred so soon after Newt’s infamous (and quickly debunked) remark linking the NAACP and food stamps, which was itself another bit of triangulation disguised as “outreach”.

Newt picked a fight with the black community because he knows full well that, thanks to decades of the Republican Party’s active fanning of racial hatreds as part of the Southern Strategy, the GOP base hates the black community. He wanted lots of footage and still shots of Brave Newt Facing The Angry Black Men (and Women) to get passed around via the usual conservative blogger suspects, especially in the Palmetto State.

This is how Newt intends to win South Carolina. And he was already nipping at Romney’s heels there, even before the latest dog-whistle to the racist GOP base.

We’re talking about the state was dedicated to the preservation of slavery and bitterly resisted all efforts to curb it, whose influential plantationer rulers kept slavery from being outlawed or even gradually phased out by the framers of the Constitution, and even then they nearly bolted. They were jonesing to take their state out of the Union almost from the start, and they were the main drivers of the secessionist movement and of the Civil War.

The descendants of the plantationers, physical and spiritual, are still running South Carolina in large part. They, too, saw what Newt did — tweaking the black community while pretending to seek a dialogue with it — and they will resoundingly approve.