Earlier this week, Pat Buchanan wrote a piece with the condescending headline "How to Handle Sonia."  One’s antennae immediately go up when a man who hangs around with a self-described "white nationalist" talks about "handling" the first Latina to be nominated to the Court (like she’s some kind of infestation, perhaps?) and calls her by her first name (would anyone have written a piece about Justice Alito entitled "How to Handle Sam"?)  Buchanan’s piece confirms the suspicions raised by the title: he advocates racist tactics as a political tactic for the Republican party, invoking the racist Willie Horton ad as an example John McCain ought to have followed in his presidential campaign (and, actually kind of did).

Even Lee Atwater apologized for declaring that he would "make Willie Horton [Dukakis's] running mate" in 1988, but Pat Buchanan is stuck in a bygone era, as Rachel Maddow aptly observed the other night.  In his "Sonia" piece, Buchanan advised Republicans to "expose" Judge Sotomayor "as a political activist" with a "lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males."  Buchanan does not hesitate in attacking Sotomayor in naked racial terms (continuing to condescend by using her first name): declaring that "Sonia is, first and and foremost, a Latina."  Buchanan suggests that the Republican party can "win back its lost votes" by directly appealing to white voters in racial terms; he notes that white voters made up 74% of the total vote in 2008, Hispanics just 7.4–therefore, "adding just 1 per cent to the white vote is the same as adding 10 per cent to the candidate’s Hispanic vote."

It’s pretty clear that Sen. Sessions and other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee didn’t need Buchanan’s advice; they had already decided to  focus on what Buchanan says is most important about Sotomayor: that she is a Latina.  Commentators wondered why Republicans kept quoting the "wise Latina" line, over and over.  There seems to be a pretty good working hypothesis as to why they did this: they simply wanted the white conservative voters Buchanan spoke of to hear, over and over, that Judge Sotomayor is a Latina.

This is ugly stuff, and it will be interesting to see what future commentators say about the tactics Republican senators employed during Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings.   What I keep thinking of is a passage from the Great Gatsby, where Tom Buchanan says "It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things…The idea is that we’re Nordics…and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization…"  The narrator wonders why Tom has decided to "nibble at the edge of stale ideas."  In 2009, some of us are still nibbling at these stale ideas.  It would be nice for even one Republican to denounce Buchanan’s racial tactics and the "wise Latina" mantra chanted over and over by Republican senators.