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The Winds Of Racism On The GOP Campaign Trail

Here are some things you could learn about black Americans from the recent statements and insinuations of Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radio personalities:

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them somethingbecause they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history. It is already more race-soaked than the 2008 election, which, of course, marked the first time that a black man became a major-party candidate.

I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because Senator John McCain, the Republican contender in 2008, generally and admirably refused to race-bait. But the Republican candidates in today’s contest aren’t so meticulous about avoiding the temptation to dog-whistle their way to the nomination.

A Dark Art

Dog-whistling — the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters –is one of the darkest political arts. In this race, Newt Gingrich is streets ahead of his nearest competitor in its use. In addition to his comments about black children working as janitors, he has repeatedly referred to Obama as the country’s “food-stamp president.”

Food stamps have been fixed in the minds of many white voters as a government subsidy misused by blacks at leastsince 1976, when Ronald Reagan complained of “strapping young bucks” who used public assistance to buy “T-bone steaks.” (It is distressing to remember, in light of Reagan’s subsequent beatification, that he was to racial dog-whistling what Pat Buchanan has been to Jew-baiting; it was Reagan who also introduced the “welfare queen” into public discourse.)

The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. It would be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh to run for public office, given his record of fairly straightforward race-baiting. (Limbaugh, who in the words of Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy is an “excellent entrepreneur of racial resentment,” has been on a tear lately. He has accused Obama — who he says “talks honky”around white people — and the first lady of abusing public funds as payback for the ill-treatment afforded their ancestors.)

But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enough that Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, at least during the largely white Republican primaries.

Kennedy, who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamppresident” a staple of his stump speeches.

New Realization

Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog-whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. I suspect another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making their own bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and the Democratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.

The former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who last week endorsed Gingrich, told me in an interview last year that Obama was more “international” than American. He also said that, unlike Obama, he rejects the label“African-American” because he feels “more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa.”

Representative Allen West of Florida, one of two black Republican House members, recently called the Democratic Party a “21st-century plantation” and compared himself to Harriet Tubman. In August, he said, “Today in the black community, we see individuals who are either wedded to a subsistence check or an employment check. Democrat physical enslavement has now become liberal economic enslavement, which is just as horrible.”

How far in intent is West’s message from this one, recently delivered by Rick Santorum in Sioux City, Iowa: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” (Santorum laterdenied that he said the word “black,” arguing that what he actually said was “blah.” The denial is not credible.)

The writer Gary Younge has noted that in Woodbury County, which includes Sioux City, nine times more whites use food stamps than blacks do. But it doesn’t matter: Santorum wasn’t driven from the race for making such a blatant appeal to white resentment — instead, he won the Iowa caucus.

An Odd Video

Recently, I watched an educational children’s video produced by a company part-owned by Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (and current Fox News host). The video series, called “Learn Our History,” is meant as a corrective to a left-wing interpretation of the American story.

In one episode, a group of children are transported to Washington, in the late 1970s, a time when, we are told,“people are out of work and some of their morals are just gone.” The group, walking down a cartoon version of a street from “The Wire,” is confronted by a black mugger in a tank-top emblazoned with the word “Disco.” (Yes,“Disco.”) The mugger says to the time-travelers, “Gimme yo money!”

I asked Huckabee why the video advanced this particular stereotype. We had been speaking about the rationale for the video series, and he had just finished telling me that the project was meant to encourage moral leadership. Then he told me he had nothing to do with writing the show’s scripts, but it was his impression that the mugger wasn’t meant to be black. In any case, we were talking about a cartoon, he said, and cartoons traffic in“caricature.”

This is something cartoons share with many of today’s leading Republicans.

 

By: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, January 31, 2012

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates, Racism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Huge Benefit For The Rich”: Warren Buffett Is Right

The revelation that Mitt Romney received an income of $21 million in 2010 and paid just 13.9 percent of that in federal income taxes has highlighted an enormous problem in our tax code. Income from investments (or income that is manipulated to appear to come from investments) is taxed at lower rates than income from work. And this is a huge benefit for the rich.

Technically, the breaks that Romney enjoys are available to anyone with investment income, but the vast majority of this type of income goes to the rich. We recently calculated that about a third of taxpayers with incomes exceeding $10 million get the majority of their income from investments and consequently pay an average effective tax rate of 15.3 percent.

We then looked at taxpayers with incomes between $60,000 and $65,000 and found that just over 2 percent get the majority of their incomes from investments. In fact, over 90 percent of the $60,000-$65,000 group get less than a tenth of their income from investments, and consequently pay an average effective tax rate of 21.3 percent. That’s a higher effective tax rate than those multimillionaires who get most of their income from investments.

How do multimillionaires justify their low effective tax rates? Many, like Warren Buffett, admit that there is no justification at all, and have asked the president and Congress to reform the tax code. Buffett finds it offensive that he pays federal taxes at a lower effective rate than his secretary does.

Others argue that special breaks for investment income are necessary to encourage investment. This is absurd, given that people with money invest in order to profit and that is motivation enough. But this argument is even more absurd in the case of wealthy fund managers like Romney, who use a loophole to characterize even their income from work as investment income to enjoy the lower tax rates. (This is the loophole for “carried interest.”)

Still others, including Romney himself, argue that much of their income represents corporate profits that have already been subject to the corporate income tax of 35 percent before they were paid out as stock dividends. This is nonsense. At least a third of Romney’s income took the form of “carried interest,” which is actually compensation for his work in managing other people’s money, and this is certainly not corporate profits.

Even in the unlikely event that all of the rest of Romney’s income did come from corporate stock dividends or gains on the sales of those stocks, there’s no reason to think that the corporations involved paid 35 percent of their profits in corporate income taxes. We recently studied most of the Fortune 500 corporations that have been profitable for each of the last three years and found that their average effective tax rate over the three-year period was just 18.5 percent. Thirty of these companies paid nothing at all.

Warren Buffett is right. People like him, and Mitt Romney, should pay more to support the society that made their fabulous fortunes possible.

 

By: Scott Wamhoff, Legislative Director of Citizens for Tax Justice, Published in U. S. News and World Report, January 31, 2012

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Class Warfare, Economic Inequality | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Art Of Insincerity”: Mitt Romney, Like Father, Like Son?

In conservative political folklore, the 1964 election was a crushing defeat that laid the philosophical groundwork that ultimately led to Ronald Reagan’s triumph.

No one likes to talk as proudly about 1968’s razor-thin election of  Richard Nixon. It’s much more sanitary to take Sen. Barry Goldwater and  skip straight to Reagan. But ’68 was at least as important as ’64, and  maybe more so; it was that campaign that yielded the potent Southern strategy;  the counter-counterculture; the full-throated resentment toward coastal  elites. If ’64 was aimed at the conservative mind, ’68 was aimed at the  conservative viscera.

The late Gov. George Romney, of course, was a minor figure in the  drama of ’68. A moderate Rockefeller Republican, he would lose soundly  to Nixon, the former vice president and California senator.

With all this in mind, I looked up one of my favorite modern political histories, Garry Wills’s Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man.

Here’s what Wills had to say about that era’s candidate Romney:

Romney built up a belief in his “nonpolitical”  background: here was a man (men thought) who worked his way up in the  business world and then—sincere novice amid deal-fettered pros—entered  politics with the innocence of an outsider. The truth is that Romney  began his career in politics, after three unsuccessful attempts (at  three different schools) to get a college education. He went to  Washington, in pursuit of his childhood sweetheart, the intense Lenore,  and got a job as an aide to Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts. He did  work on tariff bills that equipped him for a new career—a lobbyist for  Alcoa, he spent nine years as a Washington glad-hander around Burning  Tree Country Club and the National Press Club. Then he became an  automobile lobbyist (on the carmakers’ Trade Advisory Commission),  dealing with the National Recovery Administration. From this post he  rose to become manager of the AMA (American Manufacturers  Association)—an office that made him, in wartime, managing director of  the Automotive Council for War Production. He had now spent nineteen  years fronting for big business among politicians.

Hmph. This sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? To be fair, former  Gov. Mitt Romney succeeded in business before failing at politics, and  he never was a lobbyist. But there’s still the same “pious baloney” about a private-sector white knight riding in to save government.

Yet here are a couple of key differences between Romney pere and  fils. According to Wills, George Romney wasn’t known for smarts: “Robert  McNamara, who urged Romney to get into politics when they were both  auto men around Detroit, later came to know him better: Romney’s  trouble, he concluded, is that the man ‘has no brains.’ ”

Even more interesting, there’s this. Romney’s presidential ambitions  were significantly thwarted by his change of heart over the Vietnam  War. He’d gone from supporting it as “morally right and necessary” to  calling for peace “at an early time.” He compared a briefing he’d  received in November 1965 to “brainwashing.”

This was no convenient flip-flop, however. Wills notes:

His greatest gift had been mesmeric power to convince  others because he so convinced himself. The blue eyes burn toward you  under that low white cap of hair; the block of athletic face is rigid  with fresh seizures of sincerity. He has a fanatic’s belief in  everything he says or does, and a prophet’s fierce anger if anyone  questions him. A desire to keep his burning conviction unsullied by  earthly ties explains his later aloofness from politics and politicians.  … He went down, thrashing ridiculously, in 1968; yet he maintained to  the end that it was a public service for him to call his briefing a  case of successful brainwashing.

In this, the son is strikingly unlike the father. It’s clear that,  whatever else Mitt Romney gleaned from the experience of ’68, he learned  about the sometimes necessary art of insincerity. Everything about  Mitt’s political career to this point suggests that he’s not content to  go down in honorable defeat, as Goldwater did. He will not be undone by  “seizures of sincerity” or a “prophet’s anger.” He is smarter, more  devious, and more contemptuous than his father.

If he could speak to his father on the other side, he might say, “You  tried your way, Dad. Now I’m trying mine. This is how a Rockefeller  Republican overcomes the ‘muttonheads’ who fell for Goldwater and  Nixon.”

 

By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 31, 2012

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Agony Of Suppressed Contempt”: Why Mitt Romney Hates Republicans

The Republican primary campaign has highlighted the barely concealed contempt in which Mitt Romney holds the electorate, especially the Republican electorate. One adviser has expressed his astonishment that GOP voters fall for clowns like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich:

“They like preachers,” the adviser said of the tea party demographic. “If you take them to a tent meeting, they’ll get whipped into a frenzy. That’s how people like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich get women to fall into bed with them.”

That is an insult putatively directed at Romney’s rivals, but which reflects heavily on the voters themselves. Another fresh insult comes today, by way of John Dickerson, who reports that Gingrich’s assault on Juan Williams worked because “‘Williams was a stand-in for Barack Obama in people’s minds,’ said one Romney adviser.”

Gee, whatever could Williams and Obama have in common? Can this be interpreted as meaning anything other than that South Carolina Republicans are a pack of racist buffoons?

Romney’s disdain for the electorate is one of his more deeply rooted traits. During his father’s 1968 presidential campaign, Romney wrote, “how can the American public like such muttonheads?”

I find that contempt pretty well-founded, and it is a relief that Romney does not believe the nonsense he spouts during the campaign. But the persistent awkwardness of Romney’s campaign style reflects this basic tension. It’s easy to try to persuade somebody for whom you have basic respect. It’s persuading somebody whom you consider stupid — while you must conceal any trace of your disdain — that’s excruciatingly difficult. Romney’s awkward manner on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.

 

By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 1, 2012

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

An “Ideological” Faith: Ron Paul’s Appealing To Mormons

He’s the only Mormon in the  presidential race, but that doesn’t mean  Mitt Romney is the only  candidate Mormons support. Another favorite  White House hopeful? Ron  Paul, whose demand that Washington strictly  adhere to the Constitution has some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints  singing his praise.

“You cannot grow up in the church and  not hear of and be taught that the Constitution is an inspired  document,” says Connor Boyack, a Mormon who heads the Utah Tenth Amendment Center. “And when it comes to who best supports and defends  the Constitution, Ron Paul is that guy.”

In Paul’s hunt for  convention delegates, the Mormon vote will be key in early caucus  states such as Nevada, where 25 percent of GOP caucus-goers in 2008 were  LDS members. Exit polls from 2008 show nine of 10 Mormon voters cast  ballots for Romney, but the Texas congressman is seeing a surge in  support there and elsewhere.

While the Salt Lake City-based  church does not officially endorse any candidate for president, members  like Boyack have been preaching the gospel of Ron Paul. Boyack explains  that Romney might be a brother in faith, but Paul’s commitment to  upholding the tenets of the Constitution make him a more ideological  choice for Mormons. A controversial and sometimes persecuted group,  Mormons have historically looked to the Constitution as a safeguard to  preserve their religious freedom. The Constitution is even mentioned in  the church’s Doctrine and Covenants, described as revelations to the  church’s founder, Joseph Smith. Brigham Young University religion  professor Richard Bennett says the devotion to the Constitution came  after an 1833 attack on a Mormon church in Missouri. Bennett says God  told Smith to use the Constitution to fight the persecution of his  church.

Paul’s team has been quick to highlight the Mormon  support, setting up a special “Latter Day Saints for Ron Paul” Facebook  page (“liked” by over 1,300 fans). It’s one of a number  dedicated to pro-Paul coalitions, including evangelicals, Protestants,  and Catholics, as well as truckers, gamers, and accountants. The  candidate is also featured in a five-minute Web ad, recycled from the  2008 campaign, titled, “Ron Paul preserves, protects, defends LDS  Constitution view.”

Paul spokesman Gary Howard says,  “Members of the LDS church make up one of those important coalitions,  all of which are great assets in this campaign. Dr. Paul’s message  resonates with everyone who believes in the principles he espouses:  limited government, personal and economic liberty.”

 

By; Lauren Fox, U. S. News and World Report, January 30, 2012

January 31, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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