The GOP’s “Rear Guard”: Republican Race-Baiting Will Come Back to Haunt Them
On the wonderful night of November 4, 2008, thousands of people, white, black, and Latino, gathered in Grant Park in Chicago to celebrate the election of our first black president. For many Americans, Barack Obama’s election was the beginning of a new era when there would be cooperation not conflict between races. Finally the racial conflict which had plagued America for centuries would come to an end. Fat chance!
The truth is that racial relations now seem to be even worse than they were before election day in 2008. The ugly truth is that Barack Obama’s election brought the bigots and haters out in full force.
The dream ended for me when I watched a Tea Party rally in Washington where several of the protestors carried posters that pictured the president of the United States as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose. Then there was the infamous incident when white Tea Party protesters at the Capitol hurled racial epithets at black members of Congress.
The Republican candidates for president have made overt and covert racial appeals. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a smart man who should know better, once said President Obama’s views on foreign policy were shaped during his childhood in Africa. During this year’s presidential campaign, Gingrich and former Sen. Rick Santorum both urged black Americans to end their dependence on federal entitlement programs. Pointedly, neither candidate offered the same advice to the millions of white Americans who receive federal benefits. Former Gov. Mitt Romney criticized his primary opponents for just about every reason under the sun, but he never called his opponents out for their racism.
The Republican race baiting filtered down through the ranks. An official of the Orange County Republican Party in California sent out an E-mail that showed the president of the United States as the child of chimpanzees. A Republican mayor in California sent an E-mail that depicted the White House lawn as a watermelon patch.
The final straw was the tragic death of Trayvon Martin.
It’s hard for me to see how Martin could have been a threat to George Zimmerman. Zimmerman had a gun and Martin was armed with a bag of Skittles. Not really a fair fight. My kids used to eat Skittles and fortunately no one shot them. But my kids are white and Trayvon Martin was black. The Republican indifference to Martin’s murder is shocking. The Pew Center released a national poll on Tuesday that indicated that a majority of Republicans believed the media had paid too much attention to the Martin tragedy. They would not think that way if the victim had been a white kid.
The question facing America is whether racial hatred is getting worse or whether it is a rear guard action by people trying to hold back the racial changes in America. I think it’s the last gasp of a dying breed of racial dinosaurs. In their book Millennial Makeover Morley Winograd and Mike Hais demonstrate that the millennial generation of young Americans, who will set the course for American politics for the next generation, is remarkably free of racial basis. And there’s a good reason for this according to the authors. Four out of every 10 Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 are black, Latino, Asian, or Arab. Many young white Americans have black and Latino friends, a situation that has created a generation almost free of racial hate.
If Republicans do win this year, it would be a classic example of winning ugly. But if they win ugly in 2012, they will pay a political price in a few years when millennials replace baby boomers as the dominant force in American politics. Don’t say I didn’t warn them.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, April 5, 2012
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A “Star Wars Bar Scene”: Mitt Romney’s Troubles Will Follow Him to the Convention
The train has left the station. The fat lady is about to sing. It is all over but the cheering. Any more trite phrases, as former Gov. Mitt Romney is about to wrap this nomination up?
On Tuesday, he should win Maryland, D.C., and Wisconsin. And some say former Sen. Rick Santorum is behind in the April 24 Pennsylvania primary.
But think about this: How does Romney manage the convention in Tampa with the likes of Rick Santorum, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul, not to mention Rep. Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain wanting their moment in the sun?
Can you see this crowd clearing their speeches with the Romney high command?
Or imagine this, former Gov. Sarah Palin, fresh off the Today show and more time as Fox News diva, begins to insist on a prime time slot. She got shoved off the stage on election night 2008, you don’t think she’ll let it happen again do you?
This could be one rough convention, one strange cast of characters. Bar scene from Star Wars, anyone?
Clearly, Mitt Romney needs to unite the party, play to the hard conservatives, make sure his base is smiling and happy. But, at what cost? By showcasing this crowd? Reminding voters of all those lovely debates? Bringing up Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin to the stage to infuriate the undecided voters and the independents? Letting Santorum further alienate women and give a culture war speech?
My guess is that Romney would rather pretend that the last year never happened or at least that he put this away by New Hampshire. Sorry, you may have to play it again, Mitt!
Sure, he will have to figure out the vice presidential pick first but this convention could be one “really big show!”
By: Peter Fenn, U. s. News and World report, April 4, 2012
Mitt’s “Hunger Games”: The GOP’s “Career Tribute” Seeks His Inner Katniss
Mitt Romney’s outing last weekend to watch The Hunger Games with his grandkids spurred snickering among the political media. In a Tuesday interview, Wolf Blitzer ribbed the governor about whether the violent flick was appropriate for such young children. Wednesday, Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski proclaimed Romney a “nerd,” while Scarborough flatly refused to believe the candidate had either seen the flick or read the book (“He did not!”), likening Mitt’s claims to his previously professed love of varmint hunting.
I get where Joe’s coming from, but come on: how could Romney not love the wildly popular tale of teens fighting to the death for the amusement of a blood-thirsty public? That’s basically been his life for the past several months. And at this point, the governor must be wondering whether it’s time to break out his bow and go all Katniss Everdeen on Newt and Rick.
Everyone knows the HG basics, right? In a post-apocalyptic society, a despotic central government forces teen “tributes” from 12 outlying districts to do battle in a sprawling, nightmarish biosphere of sorts. Twenty-four go in. One comes out—but only after the rest are slaughtered either by fellow combatants or by the lethal traps sprinkled about by Gamemakers to keep things interesting: mutated beasts, fireballs, poison vegetation, blizzards … There are no rules, and the carnage is, of course, televised.
You can see why the story naturally brings to mind the primary. Multiple combatants enter. Only one can emerge the victor. Along the way, candidates face hazards that include gaffes (Perry, Bachmann), scandal (Cain), staff upheaval (Bachmann, Gingrich), money shortages (Santorum, Gingrich), congenital blandness (Pawlenty), perceived nuttiness (Bachmann, Paul), and a complete inability to get anyone to notice they are in the game at all (Roemer, McCotter, Karger).
Once the battle proper begins (Cue Iowa!), most players don’t last long. But there are generally one or two scrappers who, no matter how badly wounded, refuse to die. This cycle, Santorum and, even more so, Gingrich have made clear their intent to limp along, inflicting as much damage as possible on what they see as an unworthy tribute.
How exactly to end this spectacle has proved a thorny question not just for Team Romney but also for a Republican leadership that’s grown weary of the public bloodbath.
The recent flood of pro-Romney endorsements by party elders hasn’t worked. Nor has high-minded talk about the need for unity. Various carrots and sticks are presumably being brandished behind the scenes (for instance, at Newt and Mitten’s secret sit-down Saturday), thus far to no avail. Unless you count Gingrich’s announcement Tuesday that he is shifting to a “big-choice convention” strategy. Tell me that doesn’t have trouble written all over it.
Some candidates might be able to pull off an above-the-fray statesman’s repose while their final opponents expire. Romney isn’t one of them. His position is too weak, his support too tenuous. Nobody liked him much to begin with, and all this slap-fighting has made him look even more unctuous and ineffectual. At this point, the Tribute from Massachusetts needs to take a breath, aim well, and—zing—put one through the enemy’s brainpan.
Not literally, of course. (Although, how awesome would it be to see Mittens decked out in leather hunting gear, shimmying up trees with a quiver of arrows strapped to his back?) But a figurative kill is in the party’s best interest as well as Mitt’s. Besting Santorum in Pennsylvania might take care of Rick, but Newt is beyond shaming and will need to be hit where he lives. You know the kind of thinly veiled brutality I’m talking about: nice little consulting business you’ve got there, shame if anything happened to it.
Of course, any Hunger Games fantasies Romney may harbor contain a fatal flaw: no way he’s Katniss. More than any of the combatants this cycle, the governor has “career tribute” written all over him—one of the privileged killing machines that hail from the rich, well-connected districts and train for battle their whole lives. Think Cato from District 2, only with more money and better hair.
Indeed, if anyone had a shot at the Katniss role, it would be Santorum: the scrappy underdog who entered the arena heavily outgunned and wound up charming the audience with his passion, ingenuity, and fierce will to survive. This is precisely the sort of inspirational, irresistible against-all-odds victory from which blockbuster fiction is made.
Republican nominees, not so much.
By: Michelle Cottle, The Daily Beast, March 30. 2012
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“Assiduously Colorblind” Conservatives: The Worst Racial Demagogues Of The Decade
In Stephen Colbert’s ongoing spoof of conservative punditry, he often insists that he cannot see color. As if to prove that he’s a spot on satirist, Rush Limbaugh has titled a Monday web item about the Trayvon Martin case, “The Left’s Obsession with Race,” wherein he explains to his audience:
This is one of those things I can’t relate to. I don’t look at people and see a race or a sexual orientation or whatever… I don’t see black-versus-white or anything. The left is the ones who do this.
A lot of conservatives honestly believe this — that the left is obsessed with race, while the right is assiduously colorblind, and wouldn’t think about the subject, let alone discuss it in public, if its adherents were in charge. It’s time that someone explain to them why the rest of America isn’t buying it.
The right’s race problem is a lot bigger than its most popular talk radio host, but he’s a good place to begin. Remember when he briefly got a gig as an NFL commentator? If you watch Monday Night Football or Sports Center, you don’t see much critical race theory creeping into the analysis. But bring in Rush Limbaugh and suddenly a conversation about Donovan McNabb’s performance turned into what, if it were submitted as a term paper in a black studies class, might be titled, “How Racial Expectations Affect The Post-Civil Rights-Era Treatment of Black Quarterbacks In Mass Media.” Whatever you think about Limbaugh’s comments, he is the one who deliberately and needlessly brought McNabb’s race into the conversation. He’s also the man who won the 2009 award for accusing more people than anyone else of racism. And the man who responded to an obscure news item about a white kid getting beat up by a black kid on a school bus by saying that sort of black-on-white violence is perfectly kosher in Barack Obama’s America. And who can forget his mocking mimicry of the way that Chinese people speak? If a black talk show host treated whites like Limbaugh treats minorities, conservatives would go ballistic.
But as I said, it isn’t just about talk radio. It’s also about politicians like Newt Gingrich. In his latest foray into racial commentary, he took President Obama to task for his comments about the Trayvon Martin case.
Here’s what Obama said:
I’ve got to be careful about my statements to make sure we’re not impairing any investigation… But obviously this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. I think that every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together, federal, state and local to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened…
My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon. I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.
To me, that’s as pitch perfect as an off-the-cuff statement gets.
Here’s how Gingrich reacted to it:
What the president said in a sense is disgraceful. It is not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe. Period. And trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I find it appalling.
See what he did there? In the course of criticizing Obama for engaging in supposed racial demagoguery, Gingrich implies that the president cares less when white kids are shot by strangers, despite the fact that reading his statement that way is the sort of mistake only an overly literal idiot (or poorly programmed computer) would actually make. Gingrich is no idiot. And he is far too undisciplined to be a computer. Given his insistence that invoking identity is needlessly divisive, he’s certainly a hypocrite. This is a guy who says the best way to understand Obama is through the prism of his alleged Kenyan anti-colonialism; a guy who says that American Muslims shouldn’t be able to build mosques in Manhattan until Saudi Arabia permits churches on its territory; someone who thinks the widespread conservative belief that Obama is a Muslim is both something Obama ought to be embarrassed about (apparently he thinks there’s something wrong with being a Muslim) and that the rumor is Obama’s fault!
It would be one thing if Limbaugh and Gingrich were jeered by fellow conservatives for their long-running forays into racial demagoguery. Instead the prevailing attitude is something like “turnabout is fair play.” Ask a conservative why they don’t call these guys out. The answer is often, “but Al Sharpton is worse.” Even if that were true, the fact that somewhere a liberal is behaving badly hardly justifies the behavior of their conservative analogues; but the uncomfortable truth conservatives refuse to face is that Sharpton’s low point happened two decades ago. Look at the past decade. Limbaugh and Gingrich are the bigger racial demagogues today.
Writing at Forbes, Josh Barro explains what’s wrong with the insistence of some conservatives that Obama’s comments in the Martin case were objectionable:
The claim running through these objections is that black Americans cannot have any special concerns in need of airing. Many of the issues raised in the Trayvon Martin case–was Trayvon Martin singled out for suspicion because he was black? Did race influence the Sanford police’s handling of the case? What is the burden of profiling on young black men?–are therefore off limits.
Barro goes on to say something the right must confront if its ever going to change its reputation on racial matters:
Conservatives, almost universally, feel like they get a bad rap on race. They catch heat when they point out improvements over the last several decades in race relations and in the material well being of minorities in America, even though those phenomena are real. They catch heat when they contend that government programs intended to help the poor have led to problems with dependency in minority communities, even though those critiques are sometimes correct. They catch heat when they criticize Affirmative Action, even when in some cases (as at the University of California) Affirmative Action was clearly dis-serving minority communities.
Why do conservatives catch such heat? It’s probably because there is still so much racism on the Right to go alongside valid arguments on issues relating to race and ethnicity. Conservatives so often get unfairly pounded on race because, so often, conservatives get fairly pounded on race. And this is the Right’s own fault, because conservatives are not serious about draining the swamp… There has been a clear strategic calculation here among Republican elites. Better to leverage or at least accept the racism of much of the Republican base than try to clean it up.
His post, complete with examples and lots more analysis, is worth reading in full. And the conclusion is spot on:
My challenge to conservatives who feel they get a bum rap on race is this. Stand up for yourself and your colleagues when you feel that a criticism is unfair. At the same time, criticize other conservatives who say racist things, cynically tolerate racism in the Republican base, or deny the mere existence of racial issues in America today. The conservative movement desperately needs self-policing on racial issues, if it ever hopes to have credibility on them.
Quite right. It is in fact the case that conservatives are sometimes attacked unfairly on racial matters, and that some conservatives are attacked because they’re obvious racial demagogues. The best “strategy” for grappling with this situation is to just call ‘em how you see ‘em.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, March 27, 2012
“No Nutritional Value”: A Farewell To Newt
It’s not easy letting him go. Not easy at all. Sort of like swearing off bedtime Ben & Jerry’s: there’s valor and the promise of self-improvement in the sacrifice, but also the sad awareness that the world just got a little less naughty. A little less fun.
No matter. It’s time to cut Newt out of our diets.
He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude. Doubly oily entendre intended.
There were calls for him to desist two weeks ago, after he lost Alabama, which abuts his home state of Georgia. But they fell on a deaf Newt.
There were fresh appeals last week, when he failed to wring even one measly delegate from Illinois on Tuesday and then Louisiana on Saturday. But Newt doesn’t need anything as prosaic as delegates, so long as there’s still pocket lint from Sheldon Adelson and the warmth of Callista’s frozen smile.
If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.
We’ve begun. As the weekend came to a close, The Times’s Trip Gabriel reported that Gingrich’s “full-time traveling press corps is down to a handful of embedded television reporters.” The Associated Press, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and even Politico had packed up their bags. I envision Newt as a larger, grayer, windier version of the little boy at the end of “Shane,” watching the last of these stubborn scribes recede into the horizon, begging them for one last sweet tweet, promising a tasty sound bite about Trayvon Martin or Robert De Niro or … “The Hunger Games!” There must be some harbinger of cultural decline to rail about there! Do “Hunger Games” contestants use food stamps? Those are always good for a diatribe or three.
I implore Fox News to pull up its drawbridge, CNN to bolt its doors. If a Newt falls in the forest and not a single news anchor listens, can he really hang around?
He says he’s propelled by a desire to promote “big ideas,” but his candidacy has devolved into ever smaller talk and ever more desperate sideshows that drag an already undistinguished debate ever lower. Late last week he actually resurrected the Obama-as-Muslim bile, saying the president’s policies raise legitimate suspicion in voters’ minds.
In truth Newt 2012 has never been a lofty enterprise. Although he loves to tout his intellectualism, he got what brief traction he did for visceral and theatrical reasons, with fits of rage and flights of fancy.
He took off when he lashed out at “the elites,” pretending not to be one of them. He soared when he savaged the news media. He rocketed to a colony on the moon.
And he illustrated a dynamic that will survive this campaign season and that we should all think about: how much the profusion of cable channels, Web outlets, other news platforms and commentary of all kinds (including this column) rewards flamboyance, histrionics and a crowded field. A brash candidate is never more than a bellow away from three minutes of air time or two paragraphs somewhere. The beast is ravenous, and I don’t mean Newt.
Yes, the serial surges of the Republican contest since August had grounding in a fickle electorate and changeable polls. But we eagerly abetted them. En route to our beige destiny of Mitt, we craved color. And showcased it.
Newt is one of the few surviving peacocks, especially if you discount Ron Paul, who’s less peacock than emaciated ostrich — never airborne, head in the sand — and so consistently discounted that no one even bothers to implore him to fold his tent. No one can remember that he pitched one.
It’s time to forget Newt as well. His delegate count is closer to Paul’s than to Rick Santorum’s. His strategy — a generous noun — hinges on a replay of the 1920 Republican convention, which picked Warren G. Harding on the 10th ballot.
The 10th ballot? That’d really send the Republican nominee into the general election with a head of steam. I can see the bumper stickers now. Newt: Battle ready. Ballot hardened.
Great politicians are memorialized with holidays, monuments, libraries. For Newt I think an ice cream flavor is in order, something in the clogged vein of Chubby Hubby or Chunky Monkey, although not so physique-focused. Nutty Professor is too obvious a suggestion, though it opens the door to pralines, aptly Southern.
Maybe Peaches ’n’ Scream? That would honor the state he comes from while acknowledging the state he’s been in — unsubtle, overwrought. Not qualifying for the Virginia primary was a blow akin to Pearl Harbor. The Palestinians are “an invented” people.
Newt is empty calories. A pointless pint of them.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 26, 2012
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