Didn’t take long for Holt to put his foot in his mouth now did it.

“I think the Republican Party is going back to more of its roots,” answered Holt. “The roots are, I was born a Democrat and reared a Dixiecrat and Reagan came in and changed our whole family to be Republicans at a very early age. I was fifteen at the time when he ran with his ideas of less taxes and less government. And it is not just Reagan, all Reagan did was talk about what the Founding Fathers instilled and what they wanted. And we have to have a country that is free and to do that we have to actually not only say as a Republican Party that we are different, we have to do it.”

Someone must have tipped Holt off that associating himself with the Dixiecrat Party, who ran primarily on a segregationists platform, was not the best idea because he sought to distance himself from this before the debate ended.

“What I was told was (that the Dixiecrats were) segregationists or whatever, I have never even heard of anything like that. The thing that we were taught when we were growing up was the old Democrat or the old Dixiecrats was for less taxes. They were very conservative, for the small business owner and that type of thing. We can talk all day long about people who have been to my house. As far as racism, there is only one thing that I can’t stand, that I won’t allow is racial jokes or anything like that. So if somebody wants to say something like that, that is just absurd. I can bring tons of people in from all over to prove otherwise. The old type Democrat was the old Reagan Democrat and that is what I was referencing.”

So Holt links himself up with the old Dixiecrat title, I’m guessing to lay the ground work for appealing to conservative Democrats down the road, then apparently remembers what the Dixiecrats were all about and works to back track the gaffe.  What’s more, he quickly brings up the old conservative “some of my best friends are black!” defense in babbling something about the people that come to his house and the people he can bring in to prove he doesn’t like racist jokes.

There’s just one thing about all this…Holt has a long record of appealing to prejudice and bigotry directed at gay people and latinos, which makes him every bit as bad as the old Dixiecrats.  Now Holt may or may not be a bigot himself, I don’t know and can’t know as I’m in no position to tell you what’s in the man’s heart.  But that really doesn’t matter.  As my grandfather would say, it’s not that which is in you that defiles you it’s that which comes out, and Jim Holt has never shied away from appealing to the prejudice and hatred of others in his campaign.  So yeah, Dixiecrat describes him nicely.  He’s just an updated version.

Tags: AR-Senate 2010, bigotry, elections and campaigns, Jim Holt, prejudice, primaries, Republican primary

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