Democrat Bigots
Gunner Asch
Monday, Jul 17, 2000 11:57 PDT
Democratic bigots
The latest GOP fad is pointing out that Democrats can hate people, too.
By Jake Tapper
It's the latest in political jujitsu -- Republicans accusing Democrats
of prejudice. Hillary Clinton charged with anti-Semitism . Republicans
aggressively slamming Vice President Al Gore for his shameless pandering
to race-baiting Rev. Al Sharpton, himself no stranger to anti-Semitic
friends and quips.
And Wednesday, Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson
addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, not only making a case for the GOP, but also reminding the civil
rights group that the Democrats were the ones in charge during all those
tough years.
News coverage focused on "how 'unusual' it was for Republicans to
address the NAACP," Nicholson said. "Actually, I think it's the
Democrats -- not Republicans -- who should be reluctant to come before
this, the nation's leading organization for the advancement of civil
rights.
"After all," the RNC chairman went on, "it was Democrats, not
Republicans, who for 40 years controlled both houses of Congress, and
the city councils and school boards in most of America's largest cities
for at least that long.
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"Two generations ago, it was Democrats like Lester Maddox and George
Wallace" -- governors of Georgia and Alabama -- "who blocked the
schoolhouse doors, saying 'Black students can't get in,'" Nicholson
said.
Nicholson then argued that education was the "new civil right,"
heralding Bush on the subject of school vouchers and quality education.
Attempting to tie the segregationists of the past to the Democratic
Party of the present, Nicholson said that "today, nearly 50 years later,
it's still Democrats standing in the schoolhouse doors. Only this time,
they're saying 'Black students can't get out' -- can't get out of public
schools that are failing them ... are unsafe ... where learning isn't
taking place."
This broadside stands as just the latest in a GOP strategy of invoking
Democrats like Maddox -- and Republicans like Rockefeller. These history
lessons may remind the public of the GOP's forgotten legacy of
tolerance, but they also strike a contrast with the party's less
impressive recent history.
On a July 10 episode of CNN's "Crossfire," Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla., the
only black Republican of all 535 members of the House and Senate, had
the unique distinction of defending Bush's tacit support of the
Confederate flag's flying over the South Carolina state capitol. Watts
defended Bush by reminding host Bill Press of who was governor of South
Carolina in 1962, when the flag was first raised.
"It was a Democratic governor by the name of Ernest Hollings" -- now a
Democratic senator -- "that raised the Confederate flag," Watts said. "I
cry for consistency. If you mention George Bush, you surely have to
mention Ernest Hollings ... We wouldn't even be talking about this issue
if Ernest Hollings wouldn't have raised the Confederate flag to start
with."
When Press mentioned Bush's now infamous Feb. 2 appearance at Bob Jones
University, where interracial dating was banned, Watts replied, "you've
had Republicans and Democrats both that have spoken at Bob Jones, and
again, it only becomes an issue if a Republican speaks at Bob Jones."
Cherylyn Harley, deputy press secretary of the RNC and an
African-American, says that these points are "important." Harley -- who
penned Nicholson's NAACP speech -- says she's eager to "remind people of
their history. The Republican Party was founded on the issue of equal
opportunity, specifically the issue of slavery and the need to eradicate
it from American life."
Sure, but that was almost 150 years ago. That Republicans still trot out
Abraham Lincoln as their standard-bearer on racial issues is
embarrassing; when Bush invoked the 138-year-old Homestead Act in his
NAACP speech last week, it was an easy target.
Harley, however, is quick to point out that it was a Republican
president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sent the National Guard to Little
Rock in 1957 to ensure the peaceful, landmark integration of Central
High School.
And there's more. Historian Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower
Center and professor of history at the University of New Orleans, also
points out that it was white Democratic Southerners who were responsible
for implementing Jim Crow laws. However, Brinkley notes, Eisenhower
appointed the liberal Republican judges in the South who implemented
Brown vs. Board of Education -- the Supreme Court decision that ended
the notion of "separate but equal" and outlawed Jim Crow.
Brinkley, author of a new biography of Rosa Parks, points in particular
to Ike judicial appointee Frank Johnson, an Alabama Republican, and hero
of New York Times editorial page editor Howell Raines, as well as the
subject of a biography written by Bobby Kennedy Jr. Johnson's role
supporting Brown and his later desegregation rulings earned him the
title "the most hated man in Alabama" by the Ku Klux Klan.
This was the Republican Party of the 1950s. Eisenhower got 60 percent of
the black vote in the election of 1956. And it was a Republican senator,
Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who broke the longest filibuster in the
U.S. Senate "conducted by the Democrats over the 1957 Civil Rights Act,"
Harley goes on.
Harley argues that it didn't end there. "It was Republicans who voted
overwhelmingly for the Civil Rights Act of 1964" as well as the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, she says. "That kind of thing is easily
researchable."
She's right: According to Congressional Quarterly, the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 passed the House 290-130, and Republican support for the bill
was much stronger than Democratic: 61 percent (152-96) of the Democrats
supported the legislation while 80 percent (138-34) of the Republicans
backed it. These numbers were similar in the Senate -- 69 percent of
Democrats (46-21), backed the bill along with 82 percent of Republicans
(27-6).
Gore's father, Sen. Al Gore Sr., D-Tenn., was one of the 21 Democrats
who voted against it. So was Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., himself a former
member of the Ku Klux Klan -- as former RNC Chair Haley Barbour was
quick to mention, two times, Thursday on "Crossfire."
It was pretty much the same for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the
House, 82 percent of the Republicans backed the bill; in the Senate, 94
percent of the Republicans backed it. Gore Sr. voted for the bill this
time, but 17 other Southern Democrats voted against it -- including Sen.
J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, a mentor to President Bill Clinton.
Further, Harley goes on, "it was [President Richard] Nixon who created
the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, believe it or not."
But in their efforts to paint the GOP as warm and inclusive, these GOP
amateur historians' memories can also seem a tad shaky. While accurately
heralding Dirksen's actions to end the 1957 filibuster, for instance,
Harley neglects to mention that the South Carolina senator conducting
the filibuster was Strom Thurmond -- who within seven years would find a
new home on the Republican side of the aisle.
There may be a lot the Democratic Party should be embarrassed about,
especially in the 1950s and '60s. There is quite a bit more for
Republicans to be ashamed of, however, especially in the 1980s and '90s.
"They're picking their decades," says Brinkley. Since Eisenhower, he
says, the parties have transformed.
Take Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., who was a student at
Ole Miss when black student James Meredith was trying to integrate the
school, and campaigned against Meredith being allowed to attend the
school. "That's the Republican Party of the South today," Brinkley says.
Watts was on target, for instance, when he slammed Democrats for failing
to mention that it was one of their own, Hollings, who was instrumental
in beginning South Carolina's Confederate flag mess. The Democratic
Party is just as wimpy when one of its own flashes a glimmer of a sheet;
there was little outrage on the Democratic side when Hollings called
Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, "the senator from B'nai B'rith," or when
he called blacks "darkies" or Latinos "wetbacks," or when he joked that
African heads of state were cannibals.
But Watts was completely off the mark when, during that same July 10
"Crossfire," he said. "Bush, I think, since has said that he should have
taken a stronger stand. I think the Confederate flag should have come
down." Bush has said no such thing, though his primary opponent, Arizona
Sen. John McCain, has.
Contacted in Warrenton, Va., the last black Republican senator, Edward
W. Brooke of Massachusetts, expressed interest in news of Nicholson's
speech. He cited a speech he delivered to the National Council of Black
Republicans on Feb. 16 and suggested that Nicholson had taken some of
his admonitions to heart.
In that speech, Brooke noted that the black Republicans' loyalty "is
even more remarkable when you consider the fact that ... you have been
far too often outright embarrassed by the policies, strategies and
public pronouncements of some of our high-ranking Republican leaders and
Republican officeholders."
For black and Hispanic voters, Brooke said, "Republican conservatism has
come to mean opposition to civil rights ... to urban Americans,
opposition to new programs and the dismantling of existing programs
which have and would improve the quality of their lives."
So what happened to change things so drastically? The Republicans who
supported the civil rights measures, according to Brinkley, were
Rockefeller Republicans, and on their way out. The civil rights
leadership of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had them
supplanting Lincoln in the hearts of black voters. These were the men
chasing Thurmond into the embrace of the GOP.
"I think I just lost the South," Johnson is said to have stated after he
signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. True enough, the election of 1968 had
white Southerners embracing Nixon and Wallace, with black Southerners
running toward Hubert Humphrey, who delivered a fiery oration in support
of civil rights at the Democratic National Convention in 1948.
The black vote was still up for grabs in 1976, though. According to
Brinkley, Jimmy Carter's official biographer, Martin Luther King Jr.'s
father, Martin Luther "Daddy" King Sr., was planning on voting for
Gerald Ford since the beloved Nelson Rockefeller was to be his vice
president; Carter had run for governor at the time, in 1970, as a
"redneck conservative," welcoming the support of segregationists and
praising Maddox as "the essence of the Democratic Party."
But then Ford dropped Rockefeller for Bob Dole, and King and civil
rights leader Andy Young endorsed Carter. In 1980, Carter, a Southerner,
lost the white South to Ronald Reagan, whose "Southern strategy"
included, as Brinkley puts it, "using the politics of race to smash the
New Deal coalition" Franklin Roosevelt had put together. "And it
worked."
Invoking images of "welfare queens," Reagan alienated many black voters,
as did George Bush Sr. in 1988 with the infamous Willie Horton ad.
Harley argues that "the whole Willie Horton thing is something that Al
Gore came up with." But when it's pointed out that Gore -- who first
mentioned Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis' ill-conceived prison
furlough program during the Democratic primaries of 1988 -- didn't use
an image of Horton, or mention the fact that he's black, Harley says,
"you're getting into semantics now. Al Gore brought that up and you know
that, whether he used a photo or not."
There were other doozies that most black voters will have a difficult
time forgetting, such as how it was leaders of the Republican Party who
led the charge to dismantle affirmative action. By last November, a poll
by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that 65
percent of blacks consider themselves Democrats, 24 percent are
independents and 5 percent are Republicans. Even J.C. Watts Sr. -- the
father of the congressman -- is oft-quoted as saying that a black man
voting for a Republican "is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders."
Or, as Gen. Colin Powell more gently put it on Fox News last month, the
GOP is "certainly not seen as the black guy's party."
Now that white America is also capable of being offended by what Brooke
referred to in February as "mean-spirited, inflammatory language, which
hurts and embarrasses large segments of our population," Bush and
Nicholson might be smart to heed Brooke's advice. And they seem to be
doing just that.
"To win elections," Brooke said, "to win the presidency, to be the
majority in the Congress, the state houses and the city and town halls,
we must reject negativism."
"Will it translate into votes in November?" Harley asks. "I don't know.
But at least you have the Republican Party reaching out, and as far as
I'm concerned that's progress."
Gunner Asch
Cliff
wrote:
>The latest GOP fad is
Lying is now a "fad"? AND new?
--
Cliff
Ed Huntress
"Gunner Asch" <gun...@NOSPAMlightspeed.net> wrote in message
news:j3oif518m0mciuime...@4ax.com...
>
> Monday, Jul 17, 2000 11:57 PDT
> Democratic bigots
> The latest GOP fad is pointing out that Democrats can hate people, too.
> By Jake Tapper
>
> It's the latest in political jujitsu -- Republicans accusing Democrats
Hahaha! I think what we have here, folks, is another case of Gunner cutting
and pasting something without reading it first. <g>
"For black and Hispanic voters, [black Republican senator] Brooke said,
'Republican conservatism has come to mean opposition to civil rights ... to
urban Americans, opposition to new programs and the dismantling of existing
programs which have and would improve the quality of their lives.'
"So what happened to change things so drastically? The Republicans who
supported the civil rights measures, according to Brinkley, were Rockefeller
Republicans, and on their way out. The civil rights leadership of presidents
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had them supplanting Lincoln in the
hearts of black voters. These were the men chasing Thurmond into the embrace
of the GOP."
--
Ed Huntress
(one of the last remaining Rockefeller Republicans)
rangerssuck
> Monday, Jul 17, 2000 11:57 PDT
> Democratic bigots
> The latest GOP fad is pointing out that Democrats can hate people, too.
> By Jake Tapper
And once again, Gunner demonstrates just how out of touch he is with
present reality.
Get a job, you worthless piece of garbage.
Ed Huntress
"rangerssuck" <range...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:350fb06b-5893-4de7...@j11g2000vbi.googlegroups.com...
Did you read the thing? The headline is supposed to be ironic. Gunner
probably read the headline and thought that was the story. <g>
--
Ed Huntress