David Brooks: Reagan didn't really mean to sound racist when he said something racist.

McBobo says it's a "slur" to criticize Reagan for using racist code words at the site of one of the most notorious racist crimes of the Civil Rights era.

But he concedes,

It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.

Callous? Sorry, I'm not seeing any slur except Reagan's -- dropping "states' rights" in front of an all-white Mississippi crowd. And how big of McBobo to concede that race "played a role" in the Republican ascent when the entire Jim Crow South is now solidly Republican and Poppy's Rove said,

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.