[Jon Henke]
First, Matt Stoller claimed that McCain's speech in Meridian, MS was a "racist dogwhistle" because a civil rights worker who had been murdered in a completely different Mississippi city had been born in Meridian. Never mind that Meridian is "not far from the naval air station where McCain once served as a naval flight instructor and McCain Field is named for his grandfather, a Navy admiral and native Mississippian."
Now, Matt Yglesias argues that McCain's emphasis on his biography is "the best way I can think of to try to take advantage of older people's potential discomfort with the idea of a woman or a black man in the White House that doesn't involve exploiting racism or sexism in a discreditable way. McCain's putting together an identity politics counter-narrative steeped in nostalgia..."
(Sigh)
So that's it, then? Democrats - whether due to paranoia or calculation - are going to see racism under every rock, and they're going to exploit the hell out of it. This, as long as political points can be scored for it, will be our "conversation about race." That won't exactly help heal, ease or erase racial problems, but that doesn't seem to be the goal of such accusations.
I hope I'm wrong, but I fear the paranoia is just too deep and the temptation just too much to avoid that sort of thing. There is, of course, real racism in America and it deserves our swift public scorn...but "racist" is not a term to be thrown about lightly and without substantial evidence. Its overuse can only exacerbate real racial problems.
UPDATE: I've just discovered that Matt Stoller has acknowledged that he "was probably wrong on this incident, it doesn't look like a dogwhistle." I'm very glad to see it.
For decades, appealing to racist whites without leaving political fingerprints has been a standard Republican practice. That is how the smearing of John McCain in the South Carolina primary happened.
Reagan's pointed references to "welfare queens" and "young bucks" and Bush senior's use of Willie Horton mug shots were part of this tradition. McCain's operatives will dip into the same bag of tricks at an appropriate time, and plausible deniability will be supplied. (McCain will be shocked to hear of this!)
A party that salutes the thuggery of a slimy creature like Karl Rove cannot present itself as free of racist taint. The same goes for those other pillars of dirty Republican campaigning, homphobia and xenophobia.
I agree with Jon. I would also ask (in vain, no doubt) for a moratorium on the use of the phrase "dog whistle" to mean "a coded attack on a candidate."
Yes, yes, I know about Bush and Dred Scott. I have come to bury "dog whistle", not to praise it. It's uncivil to refer to political opponents as dogs and it's ridiculous to keep searching for subliminal messages in political speech. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Jon, most of Megan’s regular readers already knew that Matthew Yglesias is an idiot but thank you pointing out this Matt Stoller fellow as another disingenuous hack whose opinions are about as worthwhile as what you’d find written on a men’s room stall or what ended up on the floor due to an overly inebriated patron’s impaired aim.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Yes, and sometimes a "welfare queen" is a nice little old white lady, and a "young buck" is a deer nibbling at your roses. Willie Horton was probably just a Doctor Seuss character. None of this could have been racist.
It is well known that modern political campaigns utilize focus groups. The purpose of this tool is to craft messages that have maximum PSYCHOLOGICAL impact. Images, slogans, and settings are screened by these panels until the combinations that produce optimal results are found.
It may come as a shock to Klug, but some of these focus groups are being shown pictures of Obama and asked which of them make them most uncomfortable. Other focus groups are being shown films and pictures of black radicals linked to Obama's pastor and asked to choose which of them are most disturbing. This is all being done by professionals, and the fruits of their labor will be seen in the general election campaign.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake for the American plutocracy. People who will rain death on Iraq for personal advantage will not hesitate to use racist tactics against Obama. It is childish nonsense to suggest otherwise.
Bonus question for HH: which party defended slavery - literally to the death - then supported segregation, and comprised 100.00000000% of the KKK? Which party has a KKK member in the Senate today?
Here's a hint: Google the "Solid South."
The Democrats have been, are now, and on current running will for a long time be obsessed by race. Here's a news bulletin: most people aren't.
Dems the ones made uncomfortable by race; they're terrified that a Wright, or a Sharpton, or a Jackson, is going to open his mouth and blow the lid off of their whole scam. (Contrast these clowns with Rice and Powell).
Dems are terrified now because their two identity politics maestros are pitted against each other in mortal combat, kind of the "Victim-Off" version of Ali/Frazier, the racists v. the sexists (as they see it), with not a white male in sight to demonize. Two hammers in a world of a screws - what to do?
Dems' uneasy alliance of blue collar workers and environmentalists, feminists and moms, Jews and anti-Semites, minorities and upper crust liberals is coming apart at the seams now that, thanks to the Internet, among other things, the different groups realize that their interests are largely mutually exclusive, and that each is being told what it wants to hear.
So don't preach about racism, or sexism, or anything else "ism." The left needs to get its own house in order first. Perhaps it can enlist Hercules in a sequel to the Augean stables.
Is there any truth to the rumor that McCain is an Irishman?
Good grief, Irishism, the very worst. :)
Actually, I think if you read Matthew Yglesias's post, it's clear that he's not accusing McCain of doing anything racist. He is saying McCain is engaged a certain sort of identity politics. That identity politics applies not just to women and blacks, but also to white males is an idea that everyone should know by now--the Bush v. Kerry race had a huge undercurrent of identity politics.
And Meridian has a completely different connotation in Mississippi (and, one would assume, other Southern) minds from Philadelphia; it's the home base of the late G.V. "Sonny" Montgomery, a tireless advocate for veterans (and author of the Montgomery GI Bill, a repeat of the first GI Bill for another generation). It's definitely a military outreach visit.
I agree completely. You're only a racist if you lynch and shout "nigger" all the time.
I don't know whether McCain's a racist or not, but he damn sure don't care about black people.
You can always tell when something is a racist dogwhistle: all the liberals bark.
Fear and Narcissism on the Campaign Trail 2008
The American Democratic Party is in many ways irrepressible in its ability to hold so many faiths and credos under its poly-populist umbrella. This commitment to diversity has culminated in bringing the American political culture to a critical juncture: choosing between a white man, the Republican John McCain, a white woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Hussein Obama, a mixed-race son of a white American woman and a black Kenyan man. In the Democratic Party, psycho-historically speaking, we have a mixed race male vying against his older sister, who fathered by the majority culture male and he, fathered by the minority or foreign culture male; both vying to supplant the dominant white male brother and half-brother. Both are vying to attain to the father image of George Washington.
The dynamic is as thrilling as any Shakespearean drama and thus there is much unusual public interest. The forces of identification and object choice, as Freud coined them, are in play. In our culture, we are drawn to identify with the power and the influence of the male image whether it is white or black, though each may be shaded with different connotations. And we are drawn into a dependant and possessive stance with the female figure regardless of hue. So how do these psycho-historical dynamics play out on the campaign trail?
Barack Obama, who is a non-conventional identity object for an American political leader is competing for the attention and identification of an American public against Hillary Clinton, who once held the role of the object possessed by American; as First Lady. Although she was an unconventional First Lady, we were quite comfortable with her in that role because of and our social acceptance of her gender in a female cultural role. As she became a political leader, a Senator and now a presidential candidate, we, the American public feels at ease in her attempt to convert to the identification object rather than remain faithfully the object choice. She has moved to take on the role of father or brother rather than her respected place in gender politics. Indeed, she has moved to place herself at the pinnacle. Even the Emperor Jones could justify his role before is traditional fall, but the introduction of gender change into the paradigm acts as a cultural solvent.
This cannot feel anything but weird for those who have not been seeking the end of the American political paradigm. In this election, if one is to vote for a Democrat, it will require either an acceptance of a paradigm shift or to ignore it. We have not recently faced such an enlightened choice based on such a powerful paradigm shift; possibly not since the founding fathers and George Washington decided between royal and citizenry leadership. The difference is how the American Public sees this election is critical.
To accept the male candidate as the identity figure is conventional. We have remained within the conventional political perceptual field. To accept the female is to engage in a paradigm shift. Notwithstanding brown or white face, the paradigm of sexual identity is the strongest psychological mechanism in play. So, if we achieve a Clinton presidency, we will have demonstrated the capacity of the American political culture for a major paradigm shift. An Obama presidency would be the making of history, indeed, but not a fundamental Western cultural paradigm shift if one removes race as a factor.
I am drawn to think of the end of Spike Lee’s masterpiece dramatization of the life of Malcolm X, where he presents a montage of various men, women and children chanting, “I am Malcolm X”. This is an example of identification of the lost object, and unlike object possession, its incorporative qualities do not include the economic necessity of sustenance. They are not saying, “Malcolm X (compared how we might say when we participate in the rite of communion) sustains me so I can be one with Malcolm X.” They are stating identification with the projected life of Malcolm X into the future as he may have lived. They want to be “like” Malcolm X. Though a ground-breaking historical figure, the appreciation of Malcolm X remains in the realm of traditional patriarchal social organization.
On the campaign trail, there are not chanting, “I am Hillary Clinton” as much as there seems to be a desire to be like Obama. He has been compared to a “rock star”, and in the current “American Idol” craze, we may already be too deep into the throws of American narcissism into the 2008 race to withdrawn. None of what I am contending here has to do with the value or integrity of the candidates. But it has all to do with the perceptual field through which we view the candidates and make our choices. Hillary sits at a table with you and feeds you wonky wisdom while Barack flows across the stage casting his shadow after which we follow. Barack Obama may be destined to defeat John McCain handily in November, but what he cannot defeat is the phenomenon of leadership that brought in the presidency of George W. Bush and those who preceded him. Obama draws upon the power of the same paradigm and rides blindly on the same culturally invisible privilege. For Hillary to rise to that place in our psyche, we, the American public would have to see leadership differently. Indeed, Hillary and many of her advisors would have to see leadership differently as well. Only then would there be the ability of Americans, young and old, male and female to turn and state, “I am Hillary Clinton.”
But are we ready for such of either heady or disturbing reality when our dream of identification with the strident possessing and gaining sustenance from the object that feeds us? And how do we respond to Hillary who runs for President rejecting her cultural role in which she was to be possessed by us rather than lead us. In breaking from the traditional role, she becomes the negative image of the woman-posing-as-man. Yet we see no other paradigm. We cannot love her in this role, but we can love a son-of-immigrant dark-skinned male much easier. He is a man; no posing needed. I speak not of each candidate, but our sexually visceral reaction to them based on our ability to appreciate each. We find ourselves embedded in a powerful Catch-22. And the stakes are enormous for the woman. If Hillary were to play deeply into our psyche with conventional femininity, we could enjoy the moment and then discard her like an empty beer can. Our attention would then move on to the object we identify with as powerful.
But some must be ready as Hillary Rodham Clinton has not gotten this far solely on pure determination to overthrow the system. Our political culture is at a possible point of departure from the bonds of history. The Women’s Rights Movement which reached a stalling point may now be at a “tipping point”. It stalled in its emphasis on gender over humanity rather than gender health as part of healthy humanity. But we have seen change upon change from suffrage to the acceptance of ministry and governorships. But one role has remained sanctified in American politics. Is now the time for change?
It is clear that the choice of the leading Democrats is a departure from the functioning policies of the Conservative Republican agenda and the Bush Administration. However, there is only one political choice that Americans can make that departs from the comfort zone that Americans have dwelt in more than 200 years. Such an event will display an affirmation of the free-will of our humanity – that is to culturally cross the paradigmatic bridge together to the next phase of political social organization – one which allows for the primacy of an object choice political culture. That is, we will recognize the value of introducing feminine leadership models into times of war and peace, poverty and prosperity and in times of stasis or change. Whether we are at this point of departure will soon be apparent, but the opportunity to demonstrate the capacity for such a shift of our psychological field of vision in the American political scene is before us for the very first time.
While I'd welcome a clarification to that post, I don't think you're correct, Justin.
Yglesias said "McCain's putting together" a counter-narrative, and that this strategy will "try to take advantage of" race/gender bigotry. And what would "doesn't involve exploiting racism or sexism in a discreditable way" mean, if not an intentional effort to avoid overt racism?
I think Democrats have just conditioned themselves to see code words and racism everywhere, simply because they find it easy to believe the worst of their opponents. So you get convoluted claims of "code words" and that sort of thing. Someday, perhaps I'll write about the Lee Atwater quote about "code words" that has been radically taken out of context and taken to mean the opposite of what he was really saying.
We're ready for a woman president.
Just not this woman.
Nkrumah Jones,
Please try to make your posts longer. Your intelligence is mind-boggling. I need more of it. By the way, I'm a woman; I wonder if you're a man. Please RSVP if you know what I mean.
What crap, even for you. How do you know one way or the other?
How 'bout this one? "No one is more racist than Nutella. He doesn't care at all about black people, brown people, women, or gays. He's in hock to corporate interests, and is just in this for the money. What a bastard."
Henke,
You are absolutely correct on this one. I know for a fact that Republicans have never, ever pulled the "race card" in national elections. Nixon never did it. Regan never did. Bush 32 didn't, nor did (my personal hero) Bush 34.
Democrats are such babies, always accusing Republicans of being racists when--in fact, and you state so clearly--it's the Democrats who are racists.
And do you know the only people more racist than Democrats? Of course, Blacks--the most racist of all Americans. I myself am a victim of Black racism and it's about time people like you and me did something about it.
I love your post because it speaks the truth--but one suggestion. Instead of decrying Democrat racism--which is rampant--why not devote more time the Black racism. Myself, as a God-fearing, patriotic, white American, I'm more disgusted by Black racism than I am by the Democrats. Morons.
There is, of course, real racism in America and it deserves our swift public scorn...but "racist" is not a term to be thrown about lightly and without substantial evidence. Its overuse can only exacerbate real racial problems.
Can you set your select comfort setting when you sleep under a rock as well as on the advertised model. 'Racist' is for saying to a teacher when she admonishes you about your behavior.
Who the hell is Bush 32 or 34?
Who the hell is Bush 32 or 34?
They're cylons. Racist cylons.
I have it. We need a Pope of Racism, someone who call sell indulgences just in case we are found years later to have transgressed. Perhaps the Pope of Racism can bundle racism indulgences with carbon credits (carbon indulgences?) in a twofer, suitably discounted, of course.
So don't preach about racism, or sexism, or anything else "ism."
Well, well, well. So Republicans are not looking for the votes of people who hate blacks, gays, and evil foreigners. And all the time I thought that bashing these groups was deliberate.
If opposing gay marriage is not a dog whistle, and criticising affirmative action is not a dog whistle, and deporting illegals is not a dog whistle, why are all the bigoted dogs eager to vote for Republicans?
Ward Connerly is clearly a racist?
I'll say it again: no one - NO ONE - is more racist than a Democrat.
I'll say it again: no one - NO ONE - is more racist than a Democrat.
This is a dishonest statement because you are equating discussion of racism with encouragement of racism. Democrats discuss racism to fight it. Republican political operatives encourage racism by taking positions that appeal to racists.
This is a cheap debating tactic out of the standard Republican debating book. Apparently it actually fools some people. You could as easily say that Democrats favor terrorism because they discuss it frequently.
Democrats discuss racism to exorcise their own issues, and to attempt to benefit from it. Period. If you doubt that, learn different in August.
I can't wait.
Republicans are the party that abolished slavery; Democrats are the party that defended it. That's why Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican for many years, as were all - I repeat ALL - black members of Congress elected during Reconstruction, and all members of the KKK were Democrats.
Did you forget that, or just never know it?
Republicans are the party that abolished slavery; Democrats are the party that defended it.
This is another cheap debating trick from your tattered book of talking points. The politics of the Civil War era have nothing whatever to do with the current election or with American politics since Nixon and Reagan decided to appeal to the redneck vote. This is known as the "Southern Strategy" for a very good reason: racism.
William F. Buckley, the founder of American "conservatism," defended the segregation practices of the South. American blacks vote OVERWHELMINGLY for Democrats. Presumably they are the best judges of which party favors the interests of racial minorities.
As Victor Davis Hanson said today on NRO:
They have everything to do with today.
The Democrats have sold blacks a bill of goods, namely, vote for them and receive preferential treatment. Democrats have pandered to blacks' short-term interests for 40 years now, and to what effect? They've destroyed the black family - a formerly sound institution - with welfare, and given blacks the impression that they can't make it without Democratic demagogues running interference for them. The Democratic Party - and I bet you included - live in terror of the day blacks realize that the Dems have, as Rev. Wright put it, done them the way Bill did Monica.
The Democratic Party is intellectually and morally bankrupt, even more now than after the Civil War. The Democratic National Convention will reveal for all the world to see the sordid and threadbare nature of Democratic politics, as party appartchiks decide whether to go for the racist or sexist identity politics. In their hearts, however, they know they're going to lose either way, because they can't keep both the racists and the sexists on board the same train. This is one time they can't tell different constitiuencies different things, because they'll all be there in the same convention.
Face it, you're done. You're going to lose in November, after a bitter and acrimonious convention that must necessarily arise from your embrace of identity politics. If Obama wins, you lose the women. If Hillary wins, you lose the blacks. If Gore wins, you lose both. Any way you slice it, you lose in November.
In Wright's words, "chickens coming home to roost."
This is, of course, how Republican's wage identity politics, by constantly claiming that everyone else is waging identity politics. Accusing others of frivolously making accusations of race, of course, is also playing the race card.
Face it, you're done. You're going to lose in November, after a bitter and acrimonious convention that must necessarily arise from your embrace of identity politics.
That's an interesting position, considering the polling, the conventional wisdom, and the great preponderance of infrastructural and social advantages rests with the Democrats. A Democrat winning the White House is very likely. Democrats increasing their control of Congress is a near certainty.
I can't imagine why anyone would attack affirmative action for any reason other than to pander to bigots, given the roaring success that affirmative action has had in achieving its stated goals...
They have everything to do with today.
This is incoherent gibberish, since the century old politics of the KKK are 180 degrees away from affirmative action. The notion that the Democratic party is a contending bunch of zero sum factions is a convenient fiction for you, but it is unsupported by recent history. The Democrats practice the politics of inclusion far more than Republicans, who rely on racism, homophobia, and xenophobia, topped off with a thick slice of militarism. You can see the inclusiveness of Republicans in the lineup of their primary contenders: a wall of old white men. Just a coincidence, or are white men destined to govern their inferiors?
I do view both parties as essentially corrupted by corporate bribery, but in terms of their platforms and public messages, there is no doubt that Republicans quietly encourage the hatred of minorities (racial, sexual, or national), and the Democrats loudly discourage it.
The great advances of MLK and the civil rights movement happened because of the support of Democratic politicians, NOT Republicans. You cannot rewrite that history, and that is the history that black voters remember.
...for a brief time, before changing his mind and renouncing segregation. The leading lights of the American Progressive movement believed passionately in racist eugenics, and they never renounced anything.
Do you really wish to keep totting up this bill? Really?
...for a brief time, before changing his mind and renouncing segregation. The leading lights of the American Progressive movement believed passionately in racist eugenics, and they never renounced anything.
Actually, it took decades for Buckley to recant. Also, the American Progressive movement has almost nothing to do with contemporary liberalism. This is typical of conservatives talking out of both sides of their mouth: liberals can't at once be "slaves to the special interests of black voters," or consumed with the politics of grievance, or whatever other trite phrase you want to pull out, and simultaneously racists who support eugenics. Choose one dishonest slur, please.
HH,
CRA of '64
Senate:
Democratic Party: 46-22 (68%-32%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%-18%)
House:
Democratic Party: 153-91 (63%-37%)
Republican Party: 186-35 (84%-16%)
And still one of those No's, a filibusterer at that and a Klansmen is a Democratic Senator, who openly used the n-word in 2001 in an interview....
I assume you misspoke, care to rephrase?
As Newt Gingrich has pointed out, it is patently false to suggest that it was any other group in the Senate than liberal Democrats who passed the two most important pieces of civil rights legislation. Argue about contemporary events if you want, but attempting to rewrite history so that the Republicans ended segregation is just embarrassing.
Not true. His most famous defense of segregation came in 1957, and he recanted by the mid 1960's. Eight or ten years is not nothing, but it is relatively brief compared to the length of time that Buckley was a public intellectual guiding the conservative movement.
This is laughable, if by "contemporary liberalism" you mean what is currently practiced by the left wing of the Democratic party. They are by their own admission the ideological children of the Progressives; indeed, they insist on that label since Republicans have been so successful in turning "liberal" into a dirty word.
And this is tendentious. I brought up the Progressives in reply to a post implying that something Bill Buckley said in 1957 has something to do with the racial attitudes of conservatives in 2008. I never said that the left in 2008 advocates eugenics. The point is that the same racial essentialism that the Progressive eugenicists preached is the keystone of the racial identity politics practiced by their heirs today.
HH:
If you have evidence of these focus groups, I welcome you to share it with all of us. If there are, I condemn them and I'm sure most conservatives would as well.
Freddie,
Why do you bother with these idiots? They hate democrats and they know racism is a bad thing, ipso facto, democrats must be racist.
There is no other logic to them. Like Jonah calling liberals facists, they'll use whatever thin evidence they have to "prove" their point.
Just point, laugh, and make fun. There is no other recourse.
I mean, fuck, look at Occam. He says that "all KKK members were democrats" so that proves they're racist, ignoring the fact that all KKK members are CURRENTLY republican. He actually claims to think that the poltics of the civil war are more relevant than the politics of today.
They have their heads up their asses. They believe things, and then think of reasons, not the other way around.
I don't think "fact" is the word you were looking for there. "Fantasy", perhaps, or "fevered delusion".
Thank you for your delicately worded response, Nutella.
Ever hear of Robert Byrd?
All KKK members were Democrats. Every mothers' son of them. I don't know what they are now, and neither do you, but for a century after the Civil War the South voted solidly Democrat, out of resentment against Republicans ending slavery and passing the 14th Amendment.
This is a fact - I dare any of you comrades to deny it.
Any of you.
Tell me that in September.
So, will it be evil identity politics when Obama or Hillary run ads emphasizing how old McCain is, find pictures that make him look like he's about an hour from checking into a nursing home, or find some excerpted quote in which he sounds befuddled? And is it evil identity politics when the supporters of Obama and Hillary openly point out that part of their candidates' appeal is their race or gender, and the opportunity to have the first black or female president?
It's inevitable that the campaigns and their supporters, fellow travelers, and useful idiots will find whatever their opponent does out of bounds, racist, sexist, in bad taste, unethical, whatever. If you think this is just something done by Democrats to Republicans, you haven't been watching the Obama/Hillary fight since at least South Carolina. It's also inevitable that the media will cover these complaints, because outrage sells papers and attracts eyeballs, and journalists are mostly too lazy to discover any real news, and not bright enough to understand the newsworthy differences between the candidates' positions most of the time. But that doesn't mean there's really anything worthy of outrage most of the time.
Lately, we've been seeing Obama supporters getting really upset at Hillary, and vice versa. And yet, if the political logic works out that way, you can bet that the two will kiss and make up at the convention, and one will get the VP slot. All that manufactured outrage will just evaporate, and Obama will explain to the American People how proud he is to have such a fine, capable, experienced woman as his VP. Or Hillary will talk about how proud she is to have such a capable and brilliant man as VP, and there will never be another word from her or her supporters about that question of whether he's ready for 3AM phone calls.
"Dems' uneasy alliance"
To be fair, the Republican's uneasy alliance of the religious right, 'country clubbers', libertarians, 'national greatness'-ers, etc. is also under severe stress, exposed by the same internet trend and exacerbated and perhaps torn asunder by the war and state of the economy.
This was exhibited by the very diverse candidacies of Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, Thompson (Fred type), Tancredo, and of course, Paul (and unnamed others)
In comparison, Democrats coalesced around Obama/Clinton combo much earlier than tripartite McCain/Romney/Huckabee.
The biggest difference is that the Republicans, and Romney in particular, saw that there was no I in "President".
.
Uh, strike that.
There is no I in "winning"!
..
ummm, gimme a sec...
No I in 'Victory'?
....
Ah, got it --
There is no 'I' in "Electoral College."
Yeah, that's the ticket.
Memo to Occam's Beard (nice name, by the way, as you seem to eschew his Razor at every turn): Strom Thurmond became a Republican forty-four years ago. You can make up as convoluted an explanation as you want about how he was recanting his unfortunate past (while namedropping Robert Byrd every third sentence), or maybe you can acknowledge that the biggest racist in the Senate didn't feel so comfortable in the Democratic Party anymore.
Hell, he had his issues with the Democratic establishment as far back as 1948, when he ran under the third-party States' Rights Democrat banner. (By the way, "states' rights" is also totally not a dog-whistle turn of phrase used to appeal to racists.)
The proof is in the pudding, as they say. The old
saw that white lefties only love minorities as
"groups" while conservatives look to the individuals merits seems to sure hold true for politicians at the National level at least--espe- cially within my living memory--and I'm sixty-four.
Lets see, can anyone name a prominent Democrat married to a "woman of color"? I thought not. On
the Republican side we have Phil Graham, Mitch McConnell, Jeb Bush, William Cohen, a Repre- sentative from Oklahoma whose name I can't remember who is married to a part black former Miss Oklahoma, and, back in the sixties, we had the white daughter of the Republican Sen. from Ill., Chuck {I've drawn a blank) who married the black Republican Senator from Mass. Ed Brooke. And speaking of Mass., when that great champion and admirer of the black race Teddy Kennedy came to Louisiana's Cajun country to find a new wife did he marry a Creole beauty to demonstrate his fidelity to the concept of interracial bliss he so often bleats about? Au contraire, our man married a lily-white deb (Daughter of a prominent Dem. politician) from Lafayette. So much for left-wing
love for and solidarity with, "minorities" and the widely touted "racist" conservative hatred of all those same teeming minorities.
P.S. I'm a white Republican who married a Louisiana Creole (a woman of "color") in 1973 brfore such things were "fashionable".
Ah yes, the GOP, the party of perversion, corruption and torture lines up its advocates to squeak in eunuch fashion: "But we aren't really racists". Strange, that only a fanatical Repubican would believe it. But then, they believe that Saddam had WMD, that Iran is training Al-Qaeda, and that the US economy is in fine shape.
I'm shocked, shocked! that a political party might use identity politics to score political points!
Jon, I'd agree that it would be nice to see Yglesias make his post clearer--it's not as if there's nothing there that could suggest he's accusing the campaign of employing appeals to racists. My reasons for reading it the way I do involve the facts that:
1)The post is titled the Old Person Strategy, not anything about dogwhistles or whatnot.
2)Identity politics probably doesn't mean "racism" for Democrats in general, if anything we're likely to associate it with coded attacks on minorities. For some posts of Yglesias's that treat the issue and confirm how he perceives identity politics as being relatively innocuous, you might try this or that (I just got those by googling identity politics on his blog). Identity politics sounds worse when applied to white men then others, but I don't think that's strictly implied.
3)The emphasis on "exploiting" seems designed to rule out the post accusing McCain of exploiting racism.
4)It is sort of a brute fact about politics that race is going to be a factor in the following sense: to a substantial portion of people, an old white man will just seem more presidential than a woman or a black man with a funny name. If you're a realist about politics, you're going to view that as regrettable, but not think it's evil for candidates to try and ensure that people who tend to think that will line up for them.
I thought they were all now Ron Paul libertarians.
Funny how George Bush had the most diverse Cabinet ever.
I see a lot of specific dates, facts, and names being cited by the Republicans and a lot of name-calling and ad hominems on the Democratic side here.
How does the voting record cited above fit with Democrats supposedly being responsible for the CRA?
Whoa! This from a Democrat? Barney Frank will be interested in hearing that one. All those Republicans are planning their attendance at the next Folsom Street Fair.
At this juncture, about all the Democrats stand for are things you have to lay down, kneel, or bend over for.
Then you've got nothing to worry about at the national convention. Come August, the Dems finish "coalescing." As an aside, I'd recommend sawdust on the floor of the convention center. Lots of sawdust.
The Dems are reaping what they've sown. Their two front-running candidates are effectively interchangeable in their politics, differing largely in cosmetic aspects. But they're fighting bitterly - and mutually alienating each other's followers - because they appeal to different, mutually antagonistic, pressure groups.
They've caused this problem for themselves by consistently giving group allegiance primacy of place, and now it's even trumping political philosophy in their value system. Their primary quagmire (couldn't resist) is just "chickens [of identity politics] coming home to roost."
The irony is delicious, yes?
Senile cracker virgil xenophon writes:
Lets see, can anyone name a prominent Democrat married to a "woman of color"? I thought not. On the Republican side we have Phil Graham, Mitch McConnell, Jeb Bush, William Cohen, a Representative from Oklahoma whose name I can't remember who is married to a part black former Miss Oklahoma, and, back in the sixties, we had the white daughter of the Republican Sen. from Ill., Chuck {I've drawn a blank) who married the black Republican Senator from Mass. Ed Brooke.
Hey, Gramps: Senator Barack Obama.
And Senator Daniel Akaka, Representative John Conyers, Representative Charles Rangel ....
I could go on, but even the stupidest cross-burning cracker would get the point by now.
You have "thought not," virgil, since before the Civil Rights Era. Now stop stroking off to those Condi Rice photos, and go have your wife of "color" change your Depends.
Uh, grownups understood that virgil meant interracial marriages, Einstein.
Earnest,
Democrats led by LBJ were the driving force behind the CRA of 1964 -- that was a major reason that white Southerners started switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the late '60s. And since the late '60s, the Republican Party often used appeals to racism to boost its turnout.
Democratic leadership in the civil rights movement was also a key reason that the vast majority of blacks started voting for the Democratic Party.
I'm encouraged by the fact that others are trying so hard to obscure and spin this uncomplicated history. The argument used to be about whether racism was wrong, so the urge to engage in revisionism is actually a step in the right direction.
Of course, it's also highly entertaining. I'm sure Occam's Beard will tell you there has never been a bigger racist than LBJ.
There are grownups back here?
Guys, c'mon, let's be reasonable here. It's the Republicans that love black people, cause they tell them that it's their fault they're poor. Democrats hate black people because they claim that a few hundred years of slavery and segregation had a part to play in it, which is totally just pandering.
Nope, I won’t. In fact, I defended LBJ’s civil rights record to a lefty friend of mine who presumed he must be a galloping racist because he was from the South, where they assume things about people because of where they’re from.
Your history is correct, but your implication is not. The fact that racists switched from the Democratic to Republican Party does not imply that the latter is necessarily racist.
Democrats did push civil rights, but did so through increasing the power of the Federal Government. (Arguably, they used civil rights as a vehicle for this, rather than an end unto itself.)
Republicans have traditionally favored a smaller Federal Government, and more local control over local matters generally speaking. Democrats who opposed civil rights generally supported the so-called states’ rights view, and thus found the GOP’s local control ethos more amenable than the Democrats’ conjoining of Federal intervention with civil rights (which was reminiscent of the hated Reconstruction era). So racists in the Democratic Party moved to the Republican Party not because of its racial policies, but rather because its philosophical resistance to Federal intervention in local affairs led them to hope that the commitment to local control generally would extend to racial issues as well.
In that context, here’s a bonus question: what President sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to enforce integration?
Nope. Republicans tell black people – whom they freed, singlehandedly, over bitter Democratic resistance, I might reiterate – that they will only get better off ultimately through their own efforts, not through handouts (teach a man to fish, etc.). And that’s undeniably true.
Democrats love black people’s votes; black people themselves, not so much. (Look at the vitriol directed to black Republicans, who probably consider themselves lucky only to be called “Uncle Toms”). They’re using black people, by promising them easy fixes that keep them exactly where they are: ground down. Democrats are helping to keep them down by offering the political equivalent of crack.
Ask yourself this question: which party would lose by the development of a large, prosperous black middle class? The DNC (not to mention Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, et al.) must have nightmares about that, because a captive voting bloc would evaporate. The gravy train would screech to a halt.
I didn't expect that response Occam, and it's appreciated.
That would be Eisenhower sending troops to Little Rock, I believe.
Eisenhower would also be WAY too liberal to get nominated by the national GOP today. The parties have changed a lot over time -- most dramatically when the "Solid South" dropped the Democrats for the Republicans. It is fair to debate whether white Southerners left the Democratic Party for racist reasons or for federalist reasons (or other reasons, such as economic interest as a recent academic study suggested).
However, regardless of what really motivated those whites to leave the Democrats, it is without question that the Republicans used both blatant and veiled appeals to racism once those Southern whites had started abandoning the Democrats. Maybe Republicans didn't need to do it, but they did.
It is that relatively recent past that explains the suspicions and "paranoia" that Henke complained about in his initial post above.
If you ask me, the suspicion is justified by the extremely recent roles that people like Trent Lott, Karl Rove, and George Allen (to name just a few) played in the party.
Thanks, Oldhoya. I appreciate...your appreciation!
Would Eisenhower get nominated today? Sure. War hero of the first water, first-rate leader, strong on America. You bet he'd get nominated, unless he was considered too right-wing.
Would Kennedy be nominated today by the Democrats? Not a chance. He'd be in the rightish wing of the Republican Party today. Most people around today are too young to remember his speeches, but he was an ardent Cold Warrior.
Here are a few nuggets. I leave to your imagination how they would go down in today's Democratic Party:
And most poignantly, and apposite to today’s political environment:
Ah yes, invective and direct personal attacks on one's character from the Pavlovian Left are always the last refuge of the deranged and abusively intolerant. This latest example demonstrating yet again the impossibility of any rational dialog with the Left concerning racial matters. My foaming at the mouth attacker seems to assume that I am a native not just of "the South", but of the "Old South"--proving once again that old aphorism about what the word "assume" means. In what is probably a fruitless attempt at the edification of my attacker, and at great risk of casting the proverbial "pearls" of wisdom before...well.... I was born and raised on a college campus in the "Land of Lincoln", child of two professors. Said Univ. just also happens to be located in a town the site of which was one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. As a PhD in Poli-Sci myself, and married to whom I'm married to, I think I've got the black-white thing down fairly well. To paraphrase a certain Roman poet speaking about the tragic life of a certain Mayor of Athens: Racial "history" is something I've lived and suffered.
Oh yes, I do see where I confused my attacker. I should have said "prominent WHITE Democrat". Style points for interracial relationships only apply to two basic groups--both of which are relatively immune (for different reasons to be sure) to the slings and arrows of disapproval all too often cast by society at large--Hollywood Superstars and "guests" of the Jerry Springer show. A third set,
politicians, would also seem to be immune--but only Republicans seem to have tested the waters-- and only Republican voters seem not to penalize
their politicians for doing so.
There is an old legend (supposedly true) about the Olympic games held during the height of the Sparta-Athens rivalry in which a crippled (wrong
word, not PC) old Athenian, wishing to sit on the Athenian side, was rebuffed by his own, who refused to make room for him. Whereupon the Spartans arose as one and made room for the elderly man on their side, stating to the Athenians that while they (the Athenians) held themselves out to be the foremost exemplars of "the good" and "fair-play", it seemed that only the Spartans felt compelled to actually act on such principles --as opposed to only talking about them.
Don't take it personally, virgil xenophon, but you really need to work on your prose style. Rambling references to old legends hardly prove much of a point. Incidentally, you might also learn to spell Vergil correctly, since you have pretensions to a classical education. Also, it is reasonably well-known that the most self-congratulatory white men are usually the ones harbouring the deepest wells of racial prejudice. Naturally, this won't disturb you, and I do look forward to reading another of your self-satirizing postcards from the fringe.
Is it too late to point out that if NAS Meridian didn't have the McCain reference it wouldn't exist today?
Close NAS Beeville which has roughly 340 perfect flying weather days per year for training but keep Meridian which has roughly half that?
Oh, and does McCain get into the US Naval Academy if his last name was Smith? I seriously doubt it.
Shorter Grampa Cracker: The sole legitimate measure of a party's views on race is whether or not their white men fuck women "of color." Whether the party has prominent leaders "of color" is beside the point, as is the racial composition of its membership, because only white men and their dicks are worthy of notice.
Your reasoning is so diseased I wouldn't touch it with Strom Thurmond's dick.
Let's play the the 'dogwhistle politics' game!
1) Find phrases or words with innocent literal meanings! I choose "fairness".
2) Claim that they secretly mean something else! I'm going to claim that's a codeword for Stalinist communism.
Democrats are secretly courting communist regimes like Cuba and Venezuela with their coded phrases! Obama is secretly implying to Democrats that he will finally implement communism in America, while maintaining the plausible deniability he needs to appeal to independents. Why else would Marxists tend to support the Democrat party?
3) Repeat ad nauseum with dogged stupidity!
The 'dogwhistle politics' game is fun for the whole family, especially if your family has a keen interest in partisan politics but the IQ of box of rocks. Saves hours spent on coming up with real arguments!
Ah, Mike, you forgot to lard your post with generous use of Anglo-Saxon, and thus revealed yourself as a Rove operative. Perhaps "in response" can tutor you in proper leftist expression.
Give me a break. These people's deranged fantasies about "dog whistles" in every damn thing imaginable--this whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen.
P.S.
Posted by in response to the cracker virgil | April 2, 2008 6:59 PM
My goodness, you're articulate.
HH:
I'm still waiting.
Are not the racists and the sexist too busy duking out their own party's nomination to have the time to go after MCCain?
Although racism and racism, of course, actually exist (I like Ayn Rand's description of racism as a "the most primitive form of collectivism"), these days use of the term "racist," like use of the term "fascist" is more often than not like a sign worn atop the head of the user, with a downward-pointing arrow and the statement: "NO REAL THINKING GOING ON IN HERE."
I still don't understand the whole deal about Willie Horton. He was a convicted murderer who Mike Dukakis let out of prison on a "furlough", as if he were in service of his country or something, who committed an horrific crime in another state.
If he looked like Woody Harrelson, the point would have been the same, maybe scarier. White serial killers are way scarier than black ones, it is well known. Only Horton wasn't white. Democrats use real people to make points about the consequences of policies all the time. Because Horton was black, this technique was automatically racist? It's the liberalism, idiots.
Barack Obama is hates whites. He wears black socks doesn't he?
Why doesn't he wear white socks? Has he got something against whites?
"So that's it, then? Democrats - whether due to paranoia or calculation - are going to see racism under every rock, and they're going to exploit the hell out of it."
Nothing new about that. It's a default setting, along with "Republicans hate the poor and want to starve senior citizens".
The problem facing the Left is they must choose between a BLACK MALE and a WHITE WOMAN.
They can't get past that. It's instant, paralyzing, cognitive dissonance. They would seek authority for guidance, but there is no authority (certainly not the SUPER Delegates, whose job it will eventually be) willing to step up and declare which grievance plantation gets the fertilizer this time around.
So their default strategy is to accuse Republicans of racism when in actuality it is apparent that the Left is incapable of seriously considering actual fitness for a duty before they've ironed out the PC factors surrounding a candidate.
Compound the issue with the inherent dishonesty in just what "PC" means when applied Left and Right, and it just gets uglier. Now name a white guy running for office who could survive a twenty year association with a creature like Jeremiah Wright? No? I didn't think so.
Still, Obama has to be the candidate, because too many SUPER Delegates are dependent on the eighty-plus percent of Blacks who show up year after year and vote against their own interests, for Democrats. He'll lose big. Probably not as big as Hillary in the end, but it won't be close.
But will they pass him by? Not an option. Not even if the long term damage to the party resulting from nominating a racist empty suit far outstrips merely seeing Hillary Clinton reduced to running out her career as a senator.
The only unifying vision on the Left is hating Bush. I imagine that a whole lot of people are going to realize that once they step into the voting booth.
Popcorn. Must make sure to have enough popcorn...
It was the Gore campgain who first raised Willie Horton as a campaign issue against Dukakis. Lee Atwater simply used him more effectively later on.
Thanks, come again, better luck next time...f.
The Democrats are absolutely not racists.
To even think such a thing.
Which is why we hear from the Ds Clarence Thomas called an Uncle Tom despite his support for the people's rights in Kelo and Raich.
No racism there. No siree.
You don't even need a dog whistle to hear that one.
Didn't Al Gore, Sr. (Al Gore's father) and J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton's mentor) both vote against the Civil Rights Act?
(Figured we'd picked on poor old Bobby Byrd enough for one day)...f.
The leftist find themselves in their current position entirely because of their racism.
They are about to nominate a candidate with absolutely business running for President. Obama has no qualifications of any kind to lead this nation. He was a law college TA, though he claimed to be a professor, state senator with very little accomplishments who became a senator by running unopposed and then immediately began running for President.
Yet the Democrats flocked to vote for him without knowing anything about his background or ideals other than "change" and "hope" from his pretty speeches written by his handlers. The few policy positions he has shown are the exact same as Hillary and Edwards but they wanted Obama. Why?
The irony is too rich that the Democrats are going to be the first party to nominate a full-fledge racist and anti-semite for President, plus he and his wife are disgusted by America. Sounds like the perfect liberal candidate.
I've just discovered that Matt Stoller has acknowledged that he "was probably wrong on this incident, it doesn't look like a dogwhistle." I'm very glad to see it
Yglesias however maintains his status as a hopeless mutt.
Also, it is reasonably well-known that the most self-congratulatory white men are usually the ones harbouring the deepest wells of racial prejudice.
And on racial issues, the most self-congratulatory white men are liberal Democrats.
We've come full circle!
Presumably Bush also has 'handlers' writing his speeches... and he doesn't do nearly as well. Give Obama some credit for his genuine talent in communicating, which is indeed one qualification that we should consider seriously for presidents.
You want to know why he's in the race? One of the big reasons is because he's new... too new to have been caught in the buyer's remorse situation whereby voters demanded that the Dems vote for the Iraq war and then later turn on them for doing so.
Its also a part of the dumbing-down of American politics where total inexperience is the only defense against dirt-diggers searching for the next scandal. Look for example how much liability a career as a judge gives to a SC nominee.
We don't have a system of elections so much as a system of people who can avoid scandals while creating them for their opponents. Look to our low, low turnover rates in the house and senate and look at the exceptions... what do you find? Scandals! They and term limits are almost the only reason seats change hands nowadays.
So, Obama wasn't as adept as avoiding scandals as the people promoting him thought he would be...
The bad news for republicans is that this scandal is likely going to be the only one. And unlike Obama, McCain has decades and decades of service to his country to be mined for scandals, both new and old...
Obama isn't good at communicating, he's good at rhetoric. He's not actually communicating any information or making a case or telling people anything real. He's just delivering pretty, persuasive, but empty speeches. He's got charisma and he's eloquent.
Thanks for the quotes of President Kennedy.
I recently remarked to my teenage son that JFK would probably be a republican if he were alive.
He was surprised because, I think, public schools lionize President Kennedy, and he knows public schools are generally left of center in almost everything. To make my point,I used the example of President Kennedy's understanding that lower tax rates increase government revenue.
Now, with those quotes, it is clearer to me that JFK would have no place in today's democrat party.
I have enjoyed this discussion. My three cents are 1. that all three candidates are about the same on important issues, like resolving illegal immigration and human-induced global warming, with which large percentages of the electorate disagree; 2. that the "paradigm" shift referenced above has already happened. I think a black or a woman could be elected in November; as a society, that prospect is exciting across voter demographics; and 3. that neither Senator Obama nor Senator Clinton will be elected in November.
Well, I went to the source for the JFK quotes and read President Kennedy's comment:
Democrats vs. Republicans
We have all made mistakes. But Dante tells us that divine
justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins
of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the
occasional faults of a party living in the spirit of
charity than the consistent omissions of a party
frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
John F. Kennedy, 1960
Source:Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat, pp69
Liberals see anagrams of "racism" leaping off the page and lining themselves up like John Nash's paranoid schizophrenic delusions from "A Beautiful Mind".
To them it's real. Karl Rove = racism. Welfare reform = racism. Opposing furloughs for violent prisoners = racism. Border security = racism. Starting your campaign at a fair near a decades-old crime scene = racism. Resisting forced busing = racism. McCain running on his record = racism.
Jeremiah Wright's genocidal AIDS conspiracy theory? That's just a "frank conversation about race".
As paranoid delusions go this one seems to have a blind spot.
Re: the wonderfulness of LBJ
LBJ's explanation of why he backed the Civil Rights Act of 1957:
"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.
For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."
Eisenhower was disappointed at not being able to produce a better piece of legislation. "I wanted a much stronger civil rights bill in '57 than I could get," he later lamented. "But the Democrats . . . wouldn't let me have it."
"This commitment to diversity has culminated in bringing the American political culture to a critical juncture: choosing between a white man, the Republican John McCain, a white woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Hussein Obama, a mixed-race son of a white American woman and a black Kenyan man."
What a load...my God...this sort of nonsense pushes me more towards the McCain camp everyday.
Its not about RACE, its not about GENDER, its about selecting the best person for the job.
Get over it.
Thinking on this, democrats and racism, I find it interesting to note that the dems preferred minority group(who were once the same group they nearly tore the nation in half to keep as slaves) is really the only minority group that does not seem to thrive.
After all these years of democrat 'help' they still seem to be very state dependent, their family structures are so dysfunctional that a majority of births lack a clear familial line, crime is rampant in even higher income/education strata. The list of negatives goes on and on.
Other minorities, those not favored or former slaves of dems, have thrived.
Though I'd caution hispanics--the dems have their eye on you, you thrive, but a great number of new hispanics enter the country each year in a state that leaves them vulnerable to democrat machinations.
OK, maybe Stoller's a little over the top, but Yglesias doesn't actually seem to me to be saying anything terribly controversial.
Obviously it comes off as a little over-sensitive - McCain's biography is one of his strong points, so his campaign team would use it anyway. But don't tell me his campaign team aren't aware that focusing on McCain's traditional all-American old boy credentials is going to play especially well with voters who are a bit worried about having a woman or an African American in the White House.
Of course, that doesn't mean it's a good idea for the Dems to harp on about racism all election. But I haven't seen any evidence that the Obama campaign would do that.
"Yglesias doesn't actually seem to me to be saying anything terribly controversial."
Unless you're George Wallace or David Duke running on your record isn't racist, and to suggest it is shoots way past controversial into the territory of baseless, vile slander.
Is anyone opposed to an expansion of Godwin's Law to include spurious accusations of racism?