was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he later put it privately.
Reid’s comment was racist and stupid. He should be (and apparently is) ashamed. If members of the majority choose to remove him from leadership, so be it.
But behind Reid’s dumb comment is a real irony: Democrats have for years pandered to African American audiences by mustering faux “Negro dialects,” making everyone but the tragically unaware candidate exceedingly uncomfortable.
Al Gore, for example, spent at least part of the 2000 campaign trying to sound like TD Jakes:
If you can stand it, here’s Gore at the NAACP’s 2000 convention in Baltimore.
Amorous former North Carolina Senator John Edwards has done it too. Here he is at Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Sumter, South Carolina.
But the undisputed champion of Democratic panderers is Hillary Clinton. Here she is speaking to a black audience in a way that appears to make even Al Sharpton cringe:
[youtube bvlr0BNgWW0]
To be fair, Hillary’s pandering has never been limited to African American audiences. In 2000, she first ran for Senate from New York — a state in which she had never lived. The Illinois-born and raised candidate spent quite a lot of time clumsily trying to ingratiate herself:
I am a Cubs fan,” Clinton said. “But I needed an American League team . . . so as a young girl, I became very interested and enamored of the Yankees.
Uh huh.
To those who doubted her commitment to New York, Hillary literally said “fugeddaboudit,” Donnie Brasco style. She also emphasized her “very fond childhood memories” of her grandmother’s second husband, Max Rosenberg. Oh, and by the way, one in every eight New York voters is Jewish. Oy.
But most interesting is candidate Obama. Here he is credibly (even inspirationally) altering his speech at a church in Selma:
[youtube DdYByptC8mY]
Contrast the President’s Selma speech with just about any other talk he’s given, like this one on math and science education:
[youtube zay-TFaqd4A]
Not exactly a revival meeting.
But regardless of how amusing Democratic pandering is, at the end of the day, it is they who stand for civil rights and justice. That’s why around 72 percent of African Americans identify with the party.
Republican pandering, by contrast, is far more sinister. Core Republican voters are overwhelmingly white and among that base are, sadly, hordes of southern racists. The GOP has spent decades successfully inflaming them for electoral gain.
The late Lee Atwater, who was George HW Bush’s campaign manager, Republican Party Chairman, and Karl Rove’s close associate, described the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” this way:
You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’
In 2005, then-RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized:
It was called “the southern strategy,” started under Richard M. Nixon in 1968, and described Republican efforts to use race as a wedge issue — on matters such as desegregation and busing — to appeal to white southern voters.
Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, this morning will tell the NAACP national convention in Milwaukee that it was “wrong.”
Mehlman’s admirable (if self-serving) admission and apology notwithstanding, the GOP’s need for racist white votes vastly outweighed its ability to attract minorities, so the “Southern Strategy” not only lived on but expanded into into a gay- and immigrant-baiting hatefest that continues to this day. Thus, reliably Republican states like Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and of course Texas have stayed red.
It’s that kind of Republican politics that makes Texas Senator John Cornyn’s recent call for Reid to step down as majority leader ridiculously buffoonish. In 2007-08, Cornyn scored an NAACP rating of 28 out of 100. During that same period, Reid got a 90. On the bright side, Cornyn’s headed in the right direction: in 2005-06, he tied for last in the entire Congress with a seven. That’s how he earned a well-deserved eight percent of the black vote in 2008. Cornyn’s outrage at Reid is as genuine as his passion for civil rights.
What Reid said was reprehensible. But his party — the one with the track record of fighting for civil rights, the party to which the nation’s first African American president belongs — will deal with him. Conservatives can sit on the sidelines (or in opposition, where they spent the civil rights movement) and enjoy the show, but when it comes to issues of race and equality, they have no standing to tell any Democrat what he should and should not do.
Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com
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Calling Cornyn a buffoon is like an insult to all bufoons everywhere, Man.