Scalise a product of Nixon's 'Southern Strategy'

I love history. It helps you connect the dots interwoven in today's headlines. Take the dot of LA Representative Steve Scalise. Few outside of Louisiana ever heard of him till GOP House leaders elevated him to GOP House Whip, beating out my own Congressman Peter Roskam. They determined that the Southern red states needed some GOP clout in a Congress dominated by leaders from everywhere else, even though the South is redder than the Communist Party. So they plucked Scalise out of obscurity and voila, Scalise is handed the GOP House whip.
Now the GOP, comically trying to reach out to minority communities, must spin away Scalise's state legislature days when he spoke before a white supremacist group headed by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and voted against the Martin Luther King holiday in Louisiana. There's more. Scalise bonded with Duke's ultra conservative views, stating in 1999 he shared many of them, before lamenting Duke is not electable as a public official. “The novelty of David Duke has worn off. The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.” Not a hint about Duke's virulent racism in that lament. Just yesterday, Duke told the press to lay off his buddy Scalise saying "Why is Scalise being singled out? I don’t know. If Scalise is going to be crucified, if Republicans want to throw Steve Scalise to the woods, then a lot of them better be looking over their shoulders.” Duke implied that he would reveal his ties to any politicians who attack Scalise.

But the thread to understanding Scalise's flirtation with KKK Man Duke goes all the way back to 1964 when Southern bred President Lyndon Johnson sheparded the Civil Rights Act though a Congress dominated by solid Democratic Southern racists. Amid the jubilation Johnson lamented that his efforts on behalf of racial desegregation would cost the Democratic Party the South for 50 years. Richard Nixon, adrift in the political wilderness, concocted a plan to capture the presidency by converting those disgruntled Southern whites to the GOP. His infamous 'Southern Strategy' worked and here we are in year 51 of the Solid Republican South with no end in sight.

And one of those converts was Louisiana's Steve Scalise, who spent his formative years in Louisiana playing up to the likes of David Duke. I share the prevailing view that Scalise doesn't have a racist bone in his body. But he surely has a skeleton full of cynical political bones which told him years before he ever could conceive of a national stage, that it was in his interests to govern only to the white majority in his district. Now on that national stage, Scalise is desperately trying to erase the dots that connect him to Nixon's Southern Strategy, one of the sorrier chapters in our long and twisted racial history.