What Was I Thinking? 
Mitt Romney’s Must See Thursday has generated acres of ink.
A passing mention in an opinion piece on the build up recalls an earlier Mormon candidate, Mo Udall, and how he was done in by the sainted Jimmy Carter.
“Religion is neither a qualifier nor a disqualifier for public office, unless you are a Mormon, one of your opponents is a Southern Baptist and you are both running for the presidential nomination of your party…When former governor Jimmy Carter was in tight race with Congressman Morris “Mo” Udall for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1976, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, a Carter backer, said to a large audience of black Baptist ministers: “I’m asking you to make a choice between a man from Georgia who fights to let you in his church, and a man from Arizona whose church won’t even let you in the back door.”…Udall, who had left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over its policies toward blacks, called on Carter, a Southern Baptist layman, to repudiate Coleman’s comments. Carter refused and won the Michigan primary.”
Glorious days of old! Carter, the man who split the vote and got Lester Maddox in as Georgia Governor, paired with a man who was at least friendly with the Stalinists to slander one of the more decent politicians Arizona ever produced. 
It’s Cultural!
A Politico “Senior Political Writer” has read the entrails of the Krugman Reagan=Racist debate, rejects the thesis, and wanders even further back in the Huffington Post to find the Republicans pretty much blameless going back to the Twenties.
While claiming Reagan’s appeal wasn’t racist, David Paul Kuhn [author of The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma] makes the bizarre argument that if Northern white males voted Republican it somehow absolved pols and white Southerners of racism.
And he tries to make the case that Republican Southern gains were due to a host of factors:
“Twenty years earlier, when both parties mostly ignored the plight of blacks, Republicans won half the South. The 1928 Democratic nominee Al Smith was a Catholic running in the Protestant South. But it was more than that. Smith was against Prohibition. The GOP successfully painted him as a big city politician who had little culturally in common with the Southern everyman…In short, the first significant Republican success in the South was based on an entirely non-racial culturally populist appeal.”
“Populist” is a broad church, but to draw sharp distinctions between racism and attacks on the big cities, their swarthy ethnic inhabitants and their libidinous ways is an interesting defense.
Kuhn has a following. The ludicrous Joe Klein breathlessly asked Time‘s readers recently, “Does Merle Haggard Speak for America?”
Klein recalled his working class youth singing along to “Okie From Muskogee” and melding the aging country icon with Kuhn’s musings about living right and bein’ free.
Haggard 
“We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy, Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.”
The Richmond Virginia Chamber of Commerce says the town needs a vision, and one key to putting it all together is …..brace yourself….A PRESIDENTIAL MUSEUM!
Sadly, Richmond At The Crossroads is silent on exactly which president[s] to museum- ize.
“Make increasing tourism a major priority by [1] developing the James River, [2]
building a presidential museum and monument to religious freedom, and [3]
enhancing the convention center with surrounding night life and public safety.”
They’ve got a couple at hand.
The problem may lie in keeping these guys at bay.
Reagan: The Lost Years 
The Alabama Anniston Star editorial page looks at the Krugman/Brooks/Crespino/others not mentioned back and forth on Reagan and racism, and comes down with the dog whistling camp.
“Imagine the good a leader like Reagan could have done with his powerful skills of persuasion if he had spoken out forcefully against racism. Given that he chose another course, we’ll never know.”
Anniston knows racism. The town was the site of a hot 1961 encounter between Freedom Riders and the Klan. 
House Party or Big Tent?
The Jackson Mississippi Clarion-Ledger [“Real Mississippi”] reprints Greg Mitchell’s Editor & Publisher piece on the New York Times, Ronald Reagan, and the Neshoba County Fair.
Glorious days of old! Carter, the man who split the vote and got Lester Maddox in as Georgia Governor, paired with a man who was at least friendly with the Stalinists to slander one of the more decent politicians Arizona ever produced. 
