The Other Presidential Race Part I

I am going to be honest here.  I have been in avoidance as far as this election season is concerned.  I didn’t even watch the debates, something I usually force myself to do.  From what I’ve gathered, I didn’t miss much.  I also generally avoid campaign news and such in order not to go positively mental.  Were I to subject myself to all of that, my outrage indicator dial would push red and then shatter with glass shard shrapnel flying in all directions.  I just can’t stand to witness the Republicans lying outright to the American people with impunity; the lame-stream media seems to have altogether forgotten its watchdog role.  Because the Repubs do lie, and blatantly so, about the budget, health care, the state of the economy (and who is to blame for it), who saved the auto industry, and what kind of underwear Mittens wears – boxers or briefs?  (Answer: neither.  He wears the Temple Garment, otherwise known as Mormon Undies).* 

Temple Garments

I also, just to be properly balanced about it, can’t stand to see the lameness of the Democratic response to this barrage of mendacity.  Our Democrat in Chief himself seemed to set the tone early on by studiously ignoring even the biggest of whoppers amongst the Repubs wide repertoire of fish stories.  He's only recently deigned to notice.

So, I am perhaps not the one to go to for anything approaching a knowledgeable analysis of the campaign.  The very fact that the polls at this point are statistically tied makes me woozy. 

I can, however, offer up a historical perspective on an aspect of American politics – especially Presidential elections – that I have been thinking about of late.  Since the Conventions, in fact (two more of my studiously ignored campaign events).  I am talking about racism.  It has been on my mind since the shenanigans inside and around the Republican Convention where we witnessed racist white crackers pelting a black camerawoman with peanuts.  (Like in the zoo. Get it? Never mind).  This happened on a convention floor – and rostrum – otherwise almost entirely bereft of any color save for Wonder Bread white.  Meanwhile, another white racist Republican, this time an older woman, told an NPR reporter that Michelle Obama simply didn’t look like a First Lady.  (More on these antics later).  Now, I am certainly not asserting that all Republicans are racist – there are still a few old-school, socially progressive conservatives around.  But the incidents just cited are merely two of the many blatantly racist anti-Obama demonstrations we have witnessed of late.  Worse, however, are the subtler, hard to point the finger at, systemic forms of racism and prejudice that abides in the Republican Party. 

I refer here to such ‘coded’ messages as the Romney ad that ran extensively a while back (and, for all I know from deep in my bunker, may still be running), which claimed that Obama had ‘quietly’ dropped work requirements that were the cornerstone of welfare reform. “Under Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work…. They just send you your welfare check.”  There are two aspects of this ad that a supposedly free, independent and critical press should have jumped all over.

1) It’s wrong.  As in, liar-liar-pants-on-fire wrong.  As in didn’t happen at all.  All of the independent fact checkers called them on this, though you wouldn’t have known it by watching what passes for news media here in America.  Aljazeera covered it, but not CNN.

2) It’s racist.  Attacking welfare so gratuitously is code for attacking minorities, especially African Americans, without actually being upfront about it; open racism is out of fashion these days.  Mostly.  (See above peanut tossing incident).  

Tricky Dick enlisting Elvis in his War on Drugs, part of the War on Crime

Ever since the 1970’s, welfare has been a convenient stand-in anytime a Republican wanted to say to voters, “Hey, I’m white like you and we both want to keep the damned niggers in place, so vote for me” without actually saying it.  This was what Saint Ronald was doing when he denigrated ‘welfare queens’ during his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter, for instance. 

Welfare isn’t the only, or even the most common example of ‘dog-whistle’ politics.  Perhaps the most widely used meme is ‘Crime.’  Barry Goldwater ran as a ‘Law and Order’ candidate in 1964, and Richard Nixon was quick to jump on that bandwagon.  Tricky Dick ran ads in 1968 warning of a ‘wave of crime’ that threatened to overwhelm ‘decent and law-abiding’ Americans, vowing to ‘take the offensive against the criminal forces’ in the country.  Just what do you think most racist Americans picture when someone yells “Criminal!”?  George Herbert Walker Bush (# 41, if you’re keeping track) also famously baited the hapless Michael Dukakis by howling about the Massachusetts prison furlough program with the ‘Willie Horton’ ad, implying that he, Bush 43, would keep a lid on prisoners.  And by ‘prisoners,’ his campaign really meant, ‘blacks.’  Because, don’t forget that blacks and other minorities have long been disproportionately represented in our nation’s burgeoning prison population. ‡      

John & Cindy with daughter Bridget

And then there is race and sex.  Karl Rove, the éminence grise behind George W Bush”s campaigns (that’s #43, if you’re still keeping count), even turned it against a fellow Republican when he spread rumors in South Carolina against John McCain in 2000.  In this iteration, McCain was guilty of the racial crime of miscegenation by supposedly having fathered a black love child.  In fact, these smears were referring to Bridget, the Bangladeshi girl that John and Cindy had adopted.  Nevertheless, McCain lost that crucial primary and eventually bowed out of the 2008 race.  Ironically, it was an ancient racist southern Republican, once a racist southern Democrat, Strom Thurmond (more of whom below) who truly takes the racial hypocrisy prize: after his death in 2003 it was discovered that he had begot a child with a black maid way back in 1925.§

The present campaign has seen the ‘birther’ loons propagating what is in essence a racist idea: that there is something so terribly wrong about an African-American like Obama becoming President that he must not even be a citizen.  The 2008 campaign also abounded with sub-rosa racism, much of it cheerfully pandered by McCain’s VP choice, Sarah Palin.  According to the governor from up north, Obama was “palling around with terrorists” (presumably Arabs) and didn’t “see America like you and I do” (because he clearly isn’t a real American.  Exhibit one: he’s not white).

Need I say more?

And the recounting so far does not even include actual, substantive Republican policies and actions that are racist, such as their nation-wide campaign to disfranchise minority voters with ‘Voter ID’ laws that purport to address supposedly rampant election fraud but in fact are a thinly disguised initiative to intimidate and disfranchise minorities.  However, in spite of diligent searching under rugs and beds and behind curtains, the GOP has uncovered exactly zero credible instances of Democratic voter fraud.  In fact, this phantom fraud simply doesn’t exist.  Except that it does.  As when a voter registration contractor named Colin Small, hired by the Virginia Republican Party, was arrested by state investigators for perpetrating voter fraud after he was caught tossing completed registration forms in the trash (the Republican Attorney General declined to prosecute.  Surprise.).   Or when at least 133 Democrats in Riverside County, California found that they had been mysteriously and fraudulently registered as Republicans by a GOP registration committee called the Golden State Voter Participation Project.  

But wait, some clever and historically-minded Fearless Reader might interject, this doesn’t make sense!  Isn’t the GOP the party of Lincoln and emancipation and freedom and civil rights for black Americans?

It was, once upon a time.  In fact, both southern and northern blacks used to vote for the GOP.  Martin Luther King’s own father voted Republican until 1960.  Most of the few southern blacks who were allowed to vote before 1964 had voted Republican all their lives for the very reason that it was the party of Lincoln that had won the Civil war and emancipated the slaves.  For a while afterward the Republican Party enforced the civil and political rights of southern blacks; they even battled the Klu Klux Klan.  Until, in 1876, they didn’t, and then mostly sat on the sidelines as Jim Crow took firm hold after about 1890. 

Strom filibustering in 1957

One result of the post-war Republican assault on white pride and power was that the Democratic Party, the party of blatant racism and white supremacy, was able to establish a virtual political monopoly in the South for nearly 100 years.  It was called the ‘Solid South’ until the early 1970s.  White southerners proudly called themselves ‘Yellow Dog Democrats,’ meaning that they would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote Republican (a white, Jewish photo store owner I worked for in Austin Texas one summer boasted such to me as late as the early ‘90s).  Southern Democratic senators proved especially adept at foiling Republican-sponsored civil rights legislation through the filibuster (the real kind, where guys actually got up and talked forever).  Strom Thurmond still holds the record for the longest solo filibuster when he spent over 24 hours single-handedly sending a 1957 voting rights bill straight into the ash bin of history.  They even filibustered or otherwise derailed anti-lynching bills in 1894, 1918, 1922, 1933 (FDR wimped out on that one), and in 1948 (a bill actively supported by President Truman).

So, what caused blacks to abandon the Republican Party and southern whites (and some northern racists) to embrace it?  Why this dramatic 180 degree switch?  How, you ask, did the Democratic Party recast itself as the party of Civil rights? 

The real questions should be Who and Why.  As for the Who, I blame Eleanor, Harry and Lyndon.  As to the Why, I believe that these and other Democrats discovered justice and common decency and decided those were the winning cards in the long run.  The first steps were baby ones, but the transformation gathered speed and momentum and was completed in the space of about 20 years, give or take half a decade at either end.

N.B.  This was so long that I had to split it up.  Part II can be found immediately below.

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* Please do not work yourself into a lather about cheap shots at Mormonism.  I assure you that I’m an equal opportunity cheap shooter at all organized religion.  Stick around long enough and I’ll likely dis both Catholics and Protestants and disparage elements of Islam and even Judaism (the three crazed ‘desert religions’ we seem to be saddled with).  I can also work up a rant about the onerous Hindu caste system, just to include an Asian religion; I confess, however, that it’s hard to find anything very wrong with Buddhism, though I could try just to be fair.
    Also, yes, of course Democrats lie too.  They are regularly caught stretching, bending and breaking the truth.  However, generally it is individual pols, not the entire party.  Only the Repubs can muster such lock-step lying. 

‡ We lead the world in our incarceration rate (“We’re Number One!”  rah rah).  The only country even close is Russia; Canada, Europe and even China are way behind us in this grim statistic.  And, while a mere 0.7% of white men are imprisoned, 5% of black men and 2% of Hispanic men languish in the American prison system.  Don’t even get me started on the death penalty and rates of exectution…

§ Ole Strom set a record for length of time in the Senate (48 years) – and died in 2003 at the age of 101.  The family subsequently acknowledged his illegitimate, miscegenated daughter and she has since gained membership in the DAR as well as the United Daughters of the Confederacy based on her Thurmond parentage.  Oh, the delicious irony…

The Other Presidential Race Part II

Our Heroes

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor’s husband Franklin Delano had been elected in 1932 after cobbling together a grand coalition of northern city political machines, labor unions and workers, ethnic minorities and southern whites.  While FDR had to keep this fractious bloc together, Eleanor felt no such compunction.  And she could do what she wanted, since she had Franklin’s gonads in a pickle jar on her dresser after catching him philandering one too many times.*  So Eleanor, touring the country and visiting poor folk, discovered just how vicious and pernicious southern racism was, and took up the cause of civil rights.  It was Eleanor who in 1939 pitched a righteous fit when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to open up Constitution Hall for a concert by the great African American contralto Marion Anderson.  Eleanor promptly and publicly resigned as a member in good standing of the DAR and got Franklin to make the Lincoln Memorial available so that Anderson could stand on its steps and sing to an audience 75,000 Americans, not to mention the millions who turned in to the live radio broadcast.  It was a moment.  In fact it was a moment in the civil rights struggle not to be equaled until MLK stood on those same steps and sang his own songs some 25 later.

Marion Anderson and Eleanor's letter of resignation from the DAR

The Marion Anderson concert was merely the most public example of Eleanor’s many, mostly behind-the-scenes, acts to further the cause of racial justice in America. 

Chicago Defender headline (top) heralding 
Truman's desegregation of the US military (bottom)

Harry S. Truman‡

Next comes Harry. Hapless machine-hack senator from the former slave state of Missouri, after-thought of a Vice President, and accidental President after FDR died suddenly during his abbreviated fourth and last term in office.  HST took over the presidency in April of 1945, on the eve of the final Gotterdammerung of Nazi Germany, while the war against the Japanese was still raging, apparently without end, and with horrendous casualties on both side before he made the lonely decision to use the new atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year.  He was widely derided at the time as an empty suit, usually by people who later had to eat crow and admit that Harry was wilier and deeper than he seemed.  I include Truman primarily for one act – one Presidential fiat – that forever enshrines him as a courageous champion of American freedom and justice.  In July of 1948, in the midst of his campaign for reelection, HST issued executive order 9981 which, with the stroke of a pen, desegregated the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.  Years later he explained his reasons: "My forebears were Confederates ... but my very stomach turned over when I had heard that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten."  If any institution represents America – and all Americans – it is the US Army and its sister branches.  Though Truman took several other important steps to promote equality, this one act of decency and justice would have tectonic repercussions.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Finally, Lyndon.  Lyndon Johnson of the meteoric, rocky, rough-and-tumble rise in politics.  LBJ, the poor boy from the Texas Hill Country who idolized FDR and who climbed over dozens of senior colleagues to be King of the Senate and a leading candidate for President in 1960 – only to humbly accept the number two spot from a rich, entitled upstart of a brat from Massachusetts named John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  This was not something Johnson wanted or cherished.  In fact, he privately echoed the famous quote of a friend, in assessing the job of Vice President:  “Not worth a bucket of warm spit.”  Still, he gamely did what the despised and feared Kennedys (JFK and his brother RFK)§ told him to do, which was primarily going to funerals and visiting god-forsaken corners of the world where no other politician would be caught dead in.  He thought his career was over.  Then came November 22, 1963, and a place called Dealey Plaza in Dallas in his own home state of Texas.  It was there that he became another accidental President when his boss and sometime nemesis was brought down by an assassin’s bullet two cars ahead of him.  It was not the way LBJ wanted to become President, but nevertheless he was sworn in on Air Force One within a couple of hours and was saddled with the Kennedy legacy of mostly unfulfilled initiatives, including civil rights.  Johnson, a southern Democrat, made the civil rights cause his cause, expanding on JFK’s legislative program and presideding over the most fruitful period of civil rights legislation since the Civil War.  Lyndon Baines Johnson cajoled, bullied and defied his former Senate and House colleagues, including those from the south, to vote for or at least stay out of the way of a raft of legislation, including: the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which he muscled past a 54-day Democratic filibuster); the 1964 24^th Amendment to the Constitution banning the poll tax; the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  In a 1965 address to a joint session of Congress, this profane, deal-making, arm-twisting master of the legislative process, this son of the South in his Texas drawl echoed the words of the civil rights anthem:  “We shall overcome.”  In private, however, he predicted that "We have lost the South for a generation."  He was right.  Today, some two generations later, it is hard for any Democrat to get elected south of the Mason Dixon Line.

Georgia Senator Richard Russel getting the 'Johnson Treatment' during the civil rights battles

The Republican Party lost no time in stepping in to fill the vacuum, and they’ve been the party of Racism ever since.

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* I am, of course, speaking figuratively.  She didn’t really have his actual gonads in an actual pickle jar on her actual dresser.  She did, however, tell his mom, and threatened divorce.  Mother-in-law was, apparently, something of a battle ax and threatened to disinherit Franklin if he didn’t make nice to Eleanor.  So Eleanor had some leeway in that marriage.

‡ The initial S stands for…’S’.

§ What ever happened to initialed Presidents, anyway?  JFK, LBJ, RFK (almost), RMN and all those guys.  Okay, we did have ‘W’, but that lonely initial hardly counts…