“The Same Old Hate”: The Paradigm Of Our Age
This is for Vanessa in South Florida.
She emailed me a few days ago after spotting a bumper sticker that read: 2012 Don’t Re-Nig. “Honestly,” she wrote, “I don’t know how to process my outrage, so I’m handing it off to you. I know that President Obama’s race has always been an issue to many people, and perhaps I live a relatively sheltered life in Democratic-leaning Broward County, but I’m still stunned by the sentiment. I’m even more stunned, naive though that may be, by the fact that some people believe it’s appropriate to flaunt that sentiment — and that it’s not a source of shame.”
Vanessa, I’m afraid I’m not nearly as shocked as you. After all, the sentiment that bumper sticker expresses has been part of the Obama narrative since before he took office.
Some of us grapple with a sense of racial and cultural dislocation, the jolting sensation in a changing nation, that their prerogatives as white people, assumptions so ingrained as to have never previously required the slightest thought, are now in question. They want “their” country back. As the great satirist Randy Newman sings in a new satirical ballad:
“I’m dreaming of a white president
“Just like the ones we’ve always had
“A real live white man who knows the score
“How to handle money or start a war.”
But for others of us, it’s not anything so nuanced as a sense of dislocation — just the same old hate as always.
Either way, the world has changed enough that one cannot openly express such things. So instead, it gets hidden in oblique language, false controversies and putative “jokes.”
But Vanessa — when one in four Americans thinks there’s some mystery over the president’s birthplace, while Mitt Romney (son of a man born in Mexico) and John McCain (born in the Panama Canal Zone) face no such scrutiny; when tea partiers denounce health-care reform as “reparations;” when Rep. Lynn Westmoreland calls Obama “uppity,” then-Rep. Geoff Davis calls him “boy” and Rep. Joe Wilson yells out, “You lie!” during a presidential speech; when Rush Limbaugh says Obama’s election means it’s open season on white kids; when Obama is called a terrorist, a “food stamp president” and a “Chicago thug” — why should “Don’t Re-Nig” come as a surprise? It’s just the next logical step.
One cannot openly express one’s hate — right up till the day one can. Though even then, one may have to delude oneself.
When he was asked about that bumper sticker, Billy Smith of Ludowici, Ga., who manufactured it with his wife, Paula, told a reporter: “We didn’t mean it in a racist way.” The driver of that car would likely have said the same. But they do not lie for our benefit. They lie to conscience — and to self.
So this is the paradigm of our age — self-delusion on the one hand, a guy trying to govern on the other, while hemmed in by race, defined in crude, stereotypical imagery, yet unable to fight it, talk about it, or even admit he sees it, for fear of compromising his effectiveness, being dismissed as, God forbid — “an angry black man.”
Yet we hope our way forward anyhow.
There hangs in the White House this photo of the president bowing to allow a little black boy to touch his head. The 5-year-old, his brother and his parents were in the Oval Office with Obama and the boy had a question. “I want to know if my hair is just like yours,” he said, so softly Obama had to ask him to repeat himself. He did, and Obama invited him to see for himself. The boy hesitated.
“Touch it, dude!” the president said.
The boy did. “So, what do you think?” asked Obama.
“Yes,” said the boy, “it does feel the same.”
That child’s name is Jacob. And Vanessa, while some of us are dreaming of a white president, well, it’s likely Jacob has some new dreams of his own.
By: Leonard Pitts, The National Memo, September 24, 2012
“Eye Of The Storm”: The Sudden Disappearance Of The Welfare Lie
It began on August 7. The Romney campaign launched a major offensive on welfare policy, accusing President Obama of “gutting” existing law and “dropping work requirements.”
The attack was as obvious a lie as has ever been spoken by a presidential candidate. Mitt Romney had made this up, but proceeded to repeat the lie in every stump speech, and in five separate ads released over the course of two weeks. This one, racially-charged, entirely-made-up claim had quickly become the centerpiece of the entire Republican campaign.
And then something interesting happened. It disappeared.
Sahil Kapur reported the other day that Romney, in his convention address, chose not to repeat the lie, and the claim wasn’t included in Paul Ryan’s convention speech, either. When I checked the transcripts for Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Condoleezza Rice, and Jeb Bush, not one of them made even the slightest reference to the welfare lie.
But wait, there’s more. Romney has given three speeches since his convention address, delivering remarks in Lakeland, Jacksonville, and Cincinnati. The combined total of references to welfare in those speeches? Zero.
Also, I spoke this morning with a Democratic source who confirmed that the Romney campaign’s television ad featuring the welfare lie is not currently on the air.
So, over the course of about a week, this one transparent falsehood went from being the most potent attack in the Republican arsenal to a lie Romney and his team suddenly didn’t want to repeat.
What happened? For now, we can only speculate — the campaign has not explained the shift — but I wonder whether the allegations of racism started to take a toll.
Not only had every independent analysis proven that Romney was blatantly lying, but there was a growing consensus that the Republican was deliberately trying to exploit racism to advance his ambitions.
On Wednesday, the day before Romney’s speech, National Journal‘s Ron Fournier wrote a lengthy piece making clear that the GOP candidate has been playing a carefully-crafted racial game, and given Fournier’s credibility with the political establishment, his analysis was widely noticed, and raised questions anew about how far the former governor would go to base his campaign on an ugly, divisive deception.
It’s quite possible Romney found it easier to switch to other falsehoods, rather than risk alienating the American mainstream by sticking with his racist lie.
Or maybe I have this backwards and this is merely the eye of the storm. Romney will reportedly launch its next round of ad buys tomorrow, and maybe the welfare lie will be up front and center once again. As of today, however, the absence of the lie is hard to miss, given how invested Republicans were in the false accusation a week ago.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 4, 2012
“The GOP’s Dangerous Animals”: Mitt Romney Needs To Keep The Animals In Their Enclosures
At this week’s Republican National Convention, a pair of attendees found a novel game to play: They threw nuts at a black camera operator for CNN and told her, “This is how we feed animals.”
Convention officials evicted the tossers, who, like almost all of the delegates in the Tampa Bay Times Forum, were white. The Romney campaign condemned the antics as “deplorable” and “reprehensible.”
It’s good to know that some behavior on the far right exceeds Mitt Romney’s tolerance, but this episode of “animal” feeding was, well, peanuts compared with the broader issues restraining racial politics in the party. In his acceptance speech Thursday night, Romney became more than the Republican Party’s nominee for president; he became its zookeeper. To win the presidency and to become successful in the Oval Office, Romney must keep the animals in his own party in their enclosures — and that’s no easy task.
Hours before Romney’s speech, about 100 GOP delegates from the Western states assembled for a “special reception with elephants” at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, hosted by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and the state GOP. There, in the faux-adobe Safari Lodge, delegates mingled with Chanel the East African crowned crane, Pita the South American porcupine, Bo the African martial eagle — and Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.
Arpaio, you’ll recall, is the guy who claims that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery, who calls for the arrest and deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, who is being sued for racial profiling, and who has been an outspoken champion of the Arizona immigration crackdown largely invalidated by the Supreme Court.
At the zoo, Arpaio argued that there is no daylight between him and Romney. “The governor’s stance corresponds with my stance,” the sheriff said. “Everything he says, I agree with him.” He further boasted that he was Romney’s “campaign guy in Arizona” in 2008 and that he conferred with Romney during this year’s debates, during which Romney buried other opponents for being insufficiently tough on immigration.
Arpaio justifiably took credit for establishing the party’s position on immigration. “I don’t know how to say this without being egotistical,” he said, but “I have a lot of support across the nation from all these delegates.” Asked if he was hurting Republicans, he scoffed. “If I’m hurting the party, why did all the people running for president either visit my office or call me?” he asked. “And they all want my endorsement.”
He’s right — and it’s a shame Romney won’t send Arpaio where convention officials sent the nut-throwers. Romney needs urgently to broaden his appeal beyond the white faces on the convention floor, and he made a nod in that direction in his acceptance speech, reminding delegates that “we are a nation of immigrants.” Romney’s advisers filled the program with leaders of color such as Marco Rubio, Condi Rice, Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley.
But such gestures are easily undone by others. Romney has long lacked the courage to stand up to the more dangerous beasts on the right, from birther Donald Trump to the woman who accused President Obama of “treason.” In some cases, Romney has encouraged these sinister elements, with his recent quip in Michigan that “no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” and his false claim that Obama is gutting welfare reform. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews got into a tense standoff with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus this week when he accused Romney of playing the “race card.” Priebus called that “garbage.”
No, “garbage” is what Arpaio was tossing around at the zoo on Thursday afternoon. The sheriff let everybody know “my mother and father came from Italy — legally, of course.” And he gave them an update on Obama’s birth certificate. “We’re just looking at forged documents,” he said. “Fraud, that’s what we’re looking at.”
He discussed his round-’em-up views on illegal immigrants, he voiced his opposition to driver’s licenses or other benefits for the children of illegal immigrants, and he assured his audience that Romney was of like mind. “He’s not just talking,” Arpaio said. “I’m convinced that, the first year at the White House, he will bring this issue out.”
It’s easy to dismiss Arpaio as, er, nuts. He went on a paranoid rant about how “I’ve got demonstrators I hear out there. . . . They’re the same ones who go in front of my church.” But there wasn’t a single demonstrator outside.
Romney should be making clear that Arpaio doesn’t speak for his Republican Party any more than the nut-throwers do. Instead, the sheriff wore a convention floor pass that said “honored guest.”
BY: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 31, 2012
“The Ghosts Of Dixie”: In Modern GOP, The Old South Returns
The Republican ticket may hail from Massachusetts and Wisconsin, but Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan head the most Southernized major U.S. political party since Jefferson Davis’s day. In its hostility toward minorities, exploitation of racism, antipathy toward government and suspicion of science, today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.
No other party in U.S. history has done such a 180. Founded as the party of the anti-slavery North and committed to deep governmental involvement in spurring the economy (land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railway), today’s GOP is the negation of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans. It is almost entirely white — 92 percent, compared with just 58 percent of Democrats. It is disproportionately Southern — 49 percent of Republicans live in the South vs. 39 percent of Democrats.
The beliefs of the white South dominate Republican thinking. As the white share of the U.S. population shrinks and the Latino share rises, Republicans have passed draconian anti-immigrant laws and opposed legislation enabling immigrants brought here as children to gain legal status. They also exploit racist resentments in a way not seen since the Willie Horton spot of 1988. Consider the Romney campaign’s ads falsely attacking President Obama for gutting welfare reform. “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job,” proclaims one such commercial. “They just send you a welfare check.” Obama’s plan, as several media fact-checking monitors have noted, does nothing of the sort. The spot clearly seeks to resurrect the kind of resentment of African Americans that the GOP exploited back in the days when welfare was a major program. The Romney campaign has evidently concluded, since virtually its entire pool of potential voters is white, that it must rouse the sometime voters among them with such expedients — which explains why it is running more of these ads than any others.
In the anti-government column, the Ryan budget, which House Republicans enthusiastically adopted, would cut taxes disproportionately on the wealthy and halve the share of spending on every domestic, non-entitlement program. It would decimate education, transportation and funding for college students and scientific research. It would bring the nation down to the developmental level of the anti-tax, anti-public-investment Southern states of yore.
The ghosts of Dixie — of the Scopes Trial and the underfunding of public education — also pop up in Republicans’ willful resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism. Global warming? Evolution? Homosexuality’s causation? How babies get made? Find a robust scientific conclusion and you can find a significant number of Republicans — adducing pseudo-science and faith — who oppose it.
What’s remarkable is not that a significant number of Republicans harbor these beliefs but that these beliefs have come to dominate the party. Veteran politicians of the more pluralistic GOP that was around as recently as half a decade ago, including Orrin Hatch and Romney himself, have had to repudiate their past as thoroughly as China’s communist apparatchiks did during the Cultural Revolution. An empiricist? Not me, buddy.
But how is it that the South has come North in today’s GOP? The fact that Barack Obama is our first black president coincides with the United States’ transformation from a majority-white nation to a multiracial country no longer destined to remain the world’s hegemon. Augmented by an intractable recession rooted in a crisis of capitalism, this epochal shift has summoned the shades of racial resentment. To the extent that Republicans can depict government as the servant of this rising non-white America (precisely the purpose of Romney’s ads), the South’s antipathy toward government can find a receptive audience in other regions.
This transformation of the GOP has also been spurred by the Southernization of the economy. The U.S. economy’s dominant sector is no longer the unionized manufacturing of the Northeast and Midwest, whose leaders included such Republican moderates as George Romney, and whose white working-class employees were persuaded by their unions to back Democratic candidates. Instead, the economy is dominated by a mix of the low-wage, nonunion retail and service sectors, and by high finance, which has shown itself fiercely opposed to regulation and taxation, happy to reap and shield its profits abroad at the expense of U.S. workers, and willing to invest plenty in a party that does its bidding.
That party is meeting in Tampa this week. Cut through its self-justifying rhetoric and we’re left with a GOP whose existential credo is, “We’re old, we’re white and we want our country back.” The rest, as the sages say, is commentary.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 28, 2012
“A Strategy Of Deception”: Romney Complains While Using Race To Divide The Nation
On the eve of his nominating convention, Mitt Romney complained to USA Today about the “vituperative” and “dishonest” assaults on his character by the Obama campaign and its surrogates. “Isn’t it sad?” asked the Republican candidate. “The White House just keeps stepping lower and lower and lower, and the people of America know this is an important election and they deserve better than they’ve seen.”
This whining hardly becomes the politician who dispatched his Republican rivals with multi-million-dollar barrages of attack ads. There is some truth to his complaint that Obama’s campaign is trying “to minimize me as an individual, to make me a bad person, an unacceptable person,” but that is precisely what he did to Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum on the road to Tampa. The Republican primary season was the most vicious in memory – and committees backing Romney led the bloody pack, spending more than two-thirds of their money on negative advertising.
What he is doing now, however, is arguably much worse. And again it is the kind of political behavior that shames the memory of his father George.
What’s truly sad – for a country that hurdled an important barrier four years ago – is that Romney and his aides are running an increasingly racialized campaign, seeking to capture a supermajority of white voters, because they can see no other pathway to victory. Some analysts estimate that the Republican ticket cannot win the White House without at least 61 percent of white voters – a significantly higher percentage than voted for John McCain in 2008.
Romney’s remark about his birth certificate in Michigan last week can be generously discounted as a clumsy attempt at humor, rather than a calculated slur. Growing up in the bigoted environment of the Mormon Church, he may be sufficiently obtuse not to realize that “birtherism” is a racist movement. But that wouldn’t excuse his vile advertising, which is clearly designed to stoke white resentments with false attacks on White House welfare and health care policies. The overall theme, as Thomas Edsall, Chris Matthews, and other analysts have charged, could hardly be clearer: Obama is taking Medicare money away from hard-working whites to give cash and medical care to indolent blacks.
There is no truth to those insinuations, as anyone who spends ten minutes to investigate will discover. Yet we have long since learned that a strategy of deception can succeed if it confirms existing fears and prejudices. America is neither a post-racial nor a post-partisan society, and there are certainly voting blocs, particularly among older whites, whose underlying beliefs make them more receptive to the Republican lies about Obama.
Romney may deplore discussion of his tax returns and business career, although he has used precisely those same questions to raise doubts about Republican rivals in the past. But when he falsely accuses the President of undoing welfare reform “to shore up his base,” he is trafficking in the racial ugliness that disfigured his church for a century. Having claimed that he marched with his father for civil rights, he has a special responsibility to rein in the nastiness of his minions.
If not for the sake of simple patriotism or pride, Romney should abandon the racial messaging to protect his own legacy. More than 20 years ago, Republicans won a presidential campaign with a blatantly racial appeal. The men responsible – Roger Ailes, Larry McCarthy, the late Lee Atwater, even the first President Bush — will never quite transcend that “Willie Horton” moment when opportunism overwhelmed decency.
Neither will Mitt Romney.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, August 28, 2012
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