“Following The Well-Thumbed Republican Playbook”: The GOP Has A Bad Habit Of Appealing To Avowed Racists
Here’s some advice for House Majority Whip Steve Scalise that also applies to the Republican Party in general: If you don’t want to be associated in any way with white supremacists and neo-Nazis, then stay away from them.
Do not give a speech to a racist organization founded by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, as Scalise did when he was a Louisiana state legislator before running for Congress. Do not pretend to be the only Louisiana politician who could possibly have failed to grasp the true nature of the event, as Scalise did this week when the 2002 speech became public.
Come on, a group called the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), established by one of the nation’s proudest and most vocal bigots? Who happens to be, Rep. Scalise, from your state?
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) defended Scalise with the usual tut-tut about how speaking to the white supremacists was “an error in judgment” and how Scalise was “right to acknowledge it was wrong and inappropriate.” Despite this lapse, Boehner said, Scalise is “a man of high integrity and good character.”
As if on cue, friends and supporters chimed in to offer evidence of how demonstrably non-racist Scalise truly is. He was an early supporter of Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), an Indian American, over his white primary opponent! He coached in a predominantly black New Orleans basketball league! In the Louisiana legislature, he voted against a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — oh, wait.
See, it’s a ridiculous and ultimately meaningless exercise, putting check marks in one column or the other to decide whether a politician “is” or “is not” a racist. We hold officials accountable for what they say and do. Whatever feelings he might have in the deepest recesses of his heart, Scalise was simply following the well-thumbed Republican playbook by signaling to avowed racists that he welcomed their support.
This is nothing new. In fact, it’s like a bad habit that the party can’t seem to quit.
The addiction goes back to 1968, when Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” leveraged white racial resentment over federally mandated integration into an electoral majority. The GOP became the party of the South, even as the region — and its racial realities — underwent sweeping change. Mississippi now has more black elected officials than any other state. But do pockets of old-style, unapologetic racism persist, both in the South and elsewhere? You bet they do.
In 2002, Scalise was seeking support for his tax-cutting agenda in the legislature — and, of course, contacts that could further his political career. He was invited to speak to the EURO group by Duke’s longtime political strategist, Kenny Knight, who happened to be Scalise’s neighbor.
As prominent conservative blogger Erick Erickson wrote and tweeted this week: “How Do You Show Up at a David Duke Event and Not Know What It Is?” Erickson was not alone in finding it hard to believe that anyone involved in Louisiana politics could fail to grasp what the meeting was and who was behind it.
Poor Boehner has more of a knack for getting caught in vises than anyone else in politics. Usually he gets squeezed between the GOP’s establishment and tea party wings. This time, he’s mashed between his party’s present and its future.
Today, the Republican Party depends on a broad coalition of voters, weighted toward the South, that ranges in views from traditional Main Street conservatives to anti-government radicals who believe that menacing helicopters are about to descend any minute. One thing these GOP voters have in common is that the vast majority of them are white.
The nation, however, becomes more racially diverse every day, and the Republican Party will have to become more diverse if it is to survive. In picking and electing state-level candidates, the GOP has been doing better with governors such as Jindal, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Susana Martinez of New Mexico. In attracting voters, not so much.
One way not to attract African American and Latino voters — in fact, one way to drive them away, along with the votes of some whites as well — is to show that the party is still happy to welcome the support of unrepentant racists and anti-Semites.
Maybe someday the Republican Party will say clearly that anyone associated with Duke, his little group or any racist association should find somebody else to vote for. But this message must be sent with actions that have consequences — and it wasn’t sent this week.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 1, 2015
“Typical, Old-Fashioned, Indulgent Louisiana Republican”: Why Nobody Who Knows Louisiana Believes Steve Scalise
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) has admitted that he delivered a speech to a so-called “white rights” conference in 2002 that was held by an organization known as EURO, headed by the neo-Nazi leader David Duke. Scalise has also insisted that he shares American society’s abhorrence of such “hate groups” — and that he did not know what kind of group he was talking to. He is asking the public to believe that he did not notice any of the virulent racist and anti-Semitic talk by the Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and assorted white nationalists in attendance at this gathering.
But Louisiana Republicans have had a David Duke problem since 1989, when Duke won a state assembly seat. He had been a neo-Nazi ideologue since his youth; he had paraded one night in full Nazi uniform with a swastika armband at the state university; and he had made the “international Jewish conspiracy” central to his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Even after he was elected, Duke was still selling Holocaust denial books from his state legislative office.
Yet the Louisiana State Republican Party Central Committee refused to either investigate Duke’s views or pass a censure motion, despite the repeated efforts of Beth Rickey, a Central Committee member. When Duke said he had changed his beliefs, his fellow Republicans and many white Louisianans decided to believe him.
Then in 1990 and 1991 Duke ran in two consecutive statewide elections in Louisiana — for U.S. senator and governor — and won a majority of the white vote both times. The state was saved by black voters, whose ballots defeated him. Again, the state Republican Party refused to investigate Duke’s actual positions. Nevertheless, his worldview became the central issue in those campaigns. And after Duke equated affirmative action with the extermination of European Jews, President George H.W. Bush stepped in to denounce him. Once more, local Republicans remained silent. Scalise, who was 25 years old in 1990, could not have missed this debate, which made national news.
A few years later, Duke finally gave up his Republican “my views have changed” smokescreen. He published an Aryan primer as an autobiography in 1998, was convicted of tax fraud and went to federal prison in 2002, and began a prolonged public rant and rave about Jews that continues to this date. At the time of the EURO meeting with Scalise, Duke was overseas, attempting to avoid indictment, and addressed the gathering in Metairie, LA, via long-distance video hookup.
It is hard to believe that Steve Scalise, a sentient adult, missed all this, particularly as he was running for re-election to the state legislature in 2002. It is much easier to believe that he had the typical, old-fashioned, indulgent Louisiana Republican attitude toward David Duke. The question remains: Are there any national Republican leaders who will stand up, as President George H. W. Bush did in the 1990s, and speak the truth?
By: Leonard Zeskind, The National Memo, December 30, 2014
“Today In GOP Outreach”: House Majority Whip Admits Speaking At White-Power Event
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), the third highest-ranking member in the Republican caucus, admitted on Monday that he spoke at a white-power conference in 2002.
Scalise’s presence as an “honored guest” at a 2002 European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) conference was first reported on Sunday by Louisiana-based blogger Lamar White, Jr. EURO, which was founded by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, is classified as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
According to posts that White, Jr. uncovered from the white-power site stormfront.org, Scalise — who was a state representative at the time — addressed the crowd and “discussed ways to oversee gross mismanagement of tax revenue or ‘slush funds’ that have little or no accountability,” and “brought into sharp focus the dire circumstances pervasive in many important, under-funded needs of the community at the expense of graft within the Housing and Urban Development Fund, an apparent give-away to a selective group based on race.”
On Monday, Scalise’s spokeswoman Moira Bagley confirmed his attendence at the event to The Washington Post:
“Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints,” Bagley said. “In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around. In 2002, he made himself available to anyone who wanted to hear his proposal to eliminate slush funds that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars as well as his opposition to a proposed tax increase on middle-class families.”
She added, “He has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question. The hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group projects is in stark contradiction to what Mr. Scalise believes and practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted Catholic.”
Bagley’s statement does not specify if or when Scalise realized that he had addressed a group that believes that “the Jews are the enemy of the White race, and they are largely responsible for the ‘browning’ of America,” or that “the beautiful Germany of the 1930s with blonde children happily running through every village has been replaced with a multi-racial cesspool.” Furthermore, her claim that he “has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question” is rather undercut by the fact that he gave an apparently well-regarded speech to their annual conference.
Scalise is not the first prominent Republican to associate with white supremacists; Scalise’s former colleague in the House, Ron Paul, once praised Duke in a newsletter. But Paul never held a position nearly as powerful as majority whip.
It remains to be seen whether the new revelations will cost Scalise his position; GOP leaders are reportedly “monitoring” the situation.
Meanwhile, the news seems extremely unlikely to help Republicans in their mostly forgotten quest to reach out to minority voters.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, December 29, 2014
What Ails Europe?: Republicans Have No Idea What They’re Talking About
Lisbon.
Things are terrible here, as unemployment soars past 13 percent. Things are even worse in Greece, Ireland, and arguably in Spain, and Europe as a whole appears to be sliding back into recession.
Why has Europe become the sick man of the world economy? Everyone knows the answer. Unfortunately, most of what people know isn’t true — and false stories about European woes are warping our economic discourse.
Read an opinion piece about Europe — or, all too often, a supposedly factual news report — and you’ll probably encounter one of two stories, which I think of as the Republican narrative and the German narrative. Neither story fits the facts.
The Republican story — it’s one of the central themes of Mitt Romney’s campaign — is that Europe is in trouble because it has done too much to help the poor and unlucky, that we’re watching the death throes of the welfare state. This story is, by the way, a perennial right-wing favorite: back in 1991, when Sweden was suffering from a banking crisis brought on by deregulation (sound familiar?), the Cato Institute published a triumphant report on how this proved the failure of the whole welfare state model.
Did I mention that Sweden, which still has a very generous welfare state, is currently a star performer, with economic growth faster than that of any other wealthy nation?
But let’s do this systematically. Look at the 15 European nations currently using the euro (leaving Malta and Cyprus aside), and rank them by the percentage of G.D.P. they spent on social programs before the crisis. Do the troubled Gipsi nations (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy) stand out for having unusually large welfare states? No, they don’t; only Italy was in the top five, and even so its welfare state was smaller than Germany’s.
So excessively large welfare states didn’t cause the troubles.
Next up, the German story, which is that it’s all about fiscal irresponsibility. This story seems to fit Greece, but nobody else. Italy ran deficits in the years before the crisis, but they were only slightly larger than Germany’s (Italy’s large debt is a legacy from irresponsible policies many years ago). Portugal’s deficits were significantly smaller, while Spain and Ireland actually ran surpluses.
Oh, and countries that aren’t on the euro seem able to run large deficits and carry large debts without facing any crises. Britain and the United States can borrow long-term at interest rates of around 2 percent; Japan, which is far more deeply in debt than any country in Europe, Greece included, pays only 1 percent.
In other words, the Hellenization of our economic discourse, in which we’re all just a year or two of deficits from becoming another Greece, is completely off base.
So what does ail Europe? The truth is that the story is mostly monetary. By introducing a single currency without the institutions needed to make that currency work, Europe effectively reinvented the defects of the gold standard — defects that played a major role in causing and perpetuating the Great Depression.
More specifically, the creation of the euro fostered a false sense of security among private investors, unleashing huge, unsustainable flows of capital into nations all around Europe’s periphery. As a consequence of these inflows, costs and prices rose, manufacturing became uncompetitive, and nations that had roughly balanced trade in 1999 began running large trade deficits instead. Then the music stopped.
If the peripheral nations still had their own currencies, they could and would use devaluation to quickly restore competitiveness. But they don’t, which means that they are in for a long period of mass unemployment and slow, grinding deflation. Their debt crises are mainly a byproduct of this sad prospect, because depressed economies lead to budget deficits and deflation magnifies the burden of debt.
Now, understanding the nature of Europe’s troubles offers only limited benefits to the Europeans themselves. The afflicted nations, in particular, have nothing but bad choices: either they suffer the pains of deflation or they take the drastic step of leaving the euro, which won’t be politically feasible until or unless all else fails (a point Greece seems to be approaching). Germany could help by reversing its own austerity policies and accepting higher inflation, but it won’t.
For the rest of us, however, getting Europe right makes a huge difference, because false stories about Europe are being used to push policies that would be cruel, destructive, or both. The next time you hear people invoking the European example to demand that we destroy our social safety net or slash spending in the face of a deeply depressed economy, here’s what you need to know: they have no idea what they’re talking about.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 26, 2012
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