Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor and contributing writer for The Nation, talk about Republicans going back to the old strategy based on racism as the GOP is starting to prepare for midterm election in 2010. “The art of republican politics,” as Maddow puts it, consists of shifting the focus of political debate from real problems that the country is facing to the “wise Latina” comment and to what Rush Limbaugh referred to as a “militant black reaction” of President Barack Obama to the arrest of a leading African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

—Olga Razumovskaya

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