Elections 2008: The Race Card
by Alexander Cockburn
(Counter Punch)Political race-baiting works in America,
because racism is part of the cultural and historical furniture.
In 1960, when Barack Obama’s Kenyan father married Stanley Anne
Dunham, a white woman who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, 22
states still had laws forbidding interracial marriages. In 1967,
an appropriate year since it was the summer of love,
the US Supreme Court voided all race hygiene laws,
still on the books in 16 states. David Rosen had an instructive
essay on this history on this site
last week.
In 1988 Al Gore, running in
the New York Democratic primary against Michael Dukakis, attacked
the Massachusetts governor for supporting lax parole laws that
a year earlier had permitted a convicted black murderer called
Willie Horton to leave prison on a weekend pass. Horton used
the opportunity to rape a woman.
Dukakis prevailed nonetheless
and won the nomination. Then in the fall the Republican dirty
tricksters began circulating photos of Horton, an identikit of
every white’s nightmare about what a black rapist kicking down
the front door would look like. The leaflets insinuated that
Dukakis and Horton had been pretty much on a first name basis.
The race card was effective and was a significant factor in Dukakis’
defeat by George Bush Sr. In 2000 George Bush Jr defeated John
McCain in the South Carolina primary with the insinuation that
McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. (McCain and
his second wife, Cindy, had adopted a child from a home in India
run by Mother Teresa.)
Here we are in 2008 and the
race card has made its inevitable appearance. True to the Willie
Horton model, on February 25 someone in the Clinton campaign
sent the Drudge website a photo of Obama in Kenya a couple of
years ago, wearing a turban and what looks like a bedsheet pretending
to be a nurse’s white uniform, though apparently it is Somali
ceremonial rig. Obama’s team cried Foul. Maggie Williams, now
running Clinton’s campaign, said Obama shouldn’t be a wuss.
Already the Republicans are
using the photo as part of what will be a long summer and fall
of two-stepping around the race card. Step One: Get some rough-houser
to fire off a slur, as did right wing radio shock jock Bill Cunningham,
sounding off ripely this week about Barack Hussein Obama
as a hack black politician in a speech introducing McCain. Step
2: piously denounce the slur, just as McCain did Cunningham’s.
It happened again last Monday
with a press release from the Tennessee Republican Party which
announced that it today joins a growing chorus of Americans
concerned about the future of the nation of Israel, the only
stable democracy in the Middle East, if Sen. Barack Hussein Obama
is elected president of the United States, On Wednesday
the Republican National Committee duly reprimanded the Tennessee
Republican Party for its use of Obama’s middle name and said
it shouldn’t happen again.
Your middle name is Hussein
and you run in a US election in 2008? Of course you catch flak.
But these are only the early salvos, as the RNC slime squad runs
profile groups to help them figure out what it can get away with.
Already right-wing columns are pillorying Obama’s mother, an
anthropology professor in Hawai’i at the time of her death in
the mid-1990s, as a fellow-traveling, crypto commie slut and
lover of non-Caucasians.
Obama’s wife Michelle, the
candidate’s wife, is being portrayed as several hundred miles
to the left of Malcom X, in large part because she said recently
that owing to the huge response to her husband’s campaign for
hope and change, For the first time in my adult lifetime,
I’m really proud of my country. Cindy McCain has taken
to saying that she for one has always been proud of her country.
In the last debate Clinton called for Obama to repudiate Louis
Farrakhan –a ritual Jesse Jackson knows well. Obama finessed
the challenge gracefully, but the Republicans are taking up the
theme. Late last week the Clinton campaign was leaking stories
about support for Obama from the former Weather Undergound couple,
Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, both of whom became respectable
fixtures in mainstream liberal Chicago years ago. That hasn’t
stopped the Republican hit squads from painting Obama as a secret
Muslim, channeling bomb plots from Osama–whose photo an NBC
studio grip recently put up behind Obama in a news clip.
All the same, the race card
is a tricky one to play. A fall face-off between McCain and Obama
will target the crucial independent voters, many of whom will
be put off by race-baiting. Attitudes have changed, even since
the Horton era. A 2007 Gallup survey found more than three out
of four Americans approving of marriages between whites and blacks.
In 1994 less than half felt that way.
Adieu,
William Buckley
When I first came to America
in 1972 I was astonished to find that the conservative cold warrior
Wiliam Buckley had a television channel paid for out of public
funds and reserved for his exclusive use. This was PBS, which
alternated Buckley’s show with Wall St Week. In an
effort at balance PBS offered the left’s point of view in Sesame
Street. Buckley’s syndicated column was also featured in Dolly
Schiff’s New York Post. I found him mostly unwatchable and unreadable,
being 97 per cent predictable in all his views, with a style
intolerably loaded with affectation — fake English urbanity
and pompous usage. He was the sort of writer who could never
use the word punishment without sticking condign
in front of it, the better to flaunt his stylistic credentials.
Very, very occasionally he
would leaven his thrice weekly doses of balderdash with a piece
of libertarian bent on the justice system, but otherwise it was
straight cold-war paeans to the unfettered glories of capital.
It was all aimed at college-age conservatives. I doubt the rubes
could endure him. Who would, when the alterative was Jimmy Swaggart
in full spate?
It’s astonishing to read the
funeral paeans, flush with homages to Beckley’s urbane
civility. He wasn’t urbane at all, but a nasty little viper,
progenitor of Coulter’s style. Somewhere on youtube, though
I can’t find it, there’s surely the memorable moment when Eldridge
Cleaver put him away, and Buckley either dropped his pencil or
broke it. The famous encounter with Noam Chomsky can be found
and I commend you to watch it. Buckley duly found his apotheosis
in Reagan, the living political embodiment of Buckley’s philosophy
and intellectual ambit. So, farewell Mr Buckley. As CounterPuncher
Robert Ransdell put it in a note to us, William Buckley,
the old class warrior, is dead and gone to that great right-wing
valhalla in the sky where there isn’t any estate tax and the
peasants always know their place. All the rest of us (who aren’t
rich) are going to have to struggle on in an increasingly harsh
world and try to survive and fight against the ugly trends in
politics, economics and culture that he gleefully helped set
in motion, and which finally became dominant.
Looking for some trace of the
Cleaver- Buckley exchange, I did find this passage, in an interview
with Cleaver by Henry Louis Gates Jr., which ironically ran on
PBS’s Front Line about a decade ago:
GATES: Was the civil rights
movement a success?
CLEAVER: I think it was a success
in terms of the goals that it espoused. That was to break down
the color barrier in public accommodations, access to the institutions
and things like that. But the big failure of the civil rights
movement was that it did not have an economic plank because while
we got access to schools and to Hot Dog Stands and all that,
the burning issue right now is economic freedom and economic
justice and economic democracy. The NAACP didn’t touch that.
They had no plan for that. When Martin Luther King was turning
towards the economic arena in Nashville supporting the strike
of the garbage man, he was murdered. I applaud my country for
the changes that we have undertaken in these areas of civil rights.
But where the big problem still remains is with the economic
system. If you would call a meeting today to talk about segregation,
wouldn’t nobody come but Louis Farrakhan and David Dukes. But
if you call a meeting to talk about the money, it would be standing
room only. It wouldn’t all be black because the money is funny
for everybody, right. That’s where the rubber hits the road;
that’s what we’ve got to deal with.
Will candidate Obama prevail
against the racists? There’s a good chance. Against the money
power? Against Wall St? His record and his prime donors tells
us No. They tell us he’s already bought and paid for. For gloomy
buttress to this judgment I recommend to you Pam Martens’ piece
in our current newsletter and her sequel in our next one, available
Monday to subscribers only.
Tags: attitude, barack obama, cate, dirt, indy, rbi, target, ups