Politico can’t put the Republicans and Alabama together without citing....a Democrat? Of course, we mean segregationist Gov. George Wallace. At the top of the Politico Playbook was an article headlined “Donald Trump, Alabama and the ghost of George Wallace: The South rises for Trump, but only 20,000 of them.”
From Mobile, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger began unsubtly:
It was immigration, not segregation, that brought some 20,000 southerners - far fewer than predicted - out for Donald Trump on Friday night, but the ghost of George Wallace loomed large.
Wallace, an avowed segregationist, was the last presidential candidate to win electoral votes as a third-party candidate. The threat of Trump doing so, propelled by a hardline immigration stance that many have condemned as racist, looms over the Republican Party now as it did over the Democratic Party then, even as the enthusiasm of his following, for once, fell far short of expectations.
Schreckinger mentioned Trump was joined by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), "one of Congress’s most ardent immigration hardliners who helped the businessman craft his immigration plan." Then he shifted back to Wallace:
There were also vestiges of Wallace’s Alabama, including on the sample editions of “The First Freedom” newspaper one man handed out to drivers as they entered the parking lot. The paper’s front page included a story about “black-on-white crime in South Carolina” and an editor’s note about German media’s silence about “the actual programs these peaceful ‘neo-nazis’ stand for.”
The vast majority of supporters where white: of over 1,000 people waiting to enter on the east of the Ladd Peebles Stadium at 5 p.m., eight were black.
But conservative blogger Patterico offered a quick rebuttal of that few-blacks spin on Twitter:
.@SchreckReports The Ghost of George Wallace looms over Politico, where 5 of 243 staffers with a photo are black. http://t.co/jPYF2Kytp7
— Patterico (@Patterico) August 22, 2015
