By Former Congressman Artur Davis
Lyndon
Johnson was loathed enough that, in his final year in office, he dared
not make a public appearance other than at a military base; it was
commonplace for chanting crowds to gather and spray verbal obscenities
at LBJ’s White House. Jimmy Carter’s presidency was a routine subject of
cultural derision, some of it viciously aimed at his pre-teen daughter
and his brother. Bill Clinton spawned so much hate that at least some of
his adversaries spread strange rumors that he was connected to murder;
then there was this thing called impeachment. George W. Bush inflamed
some of his enemies enough that they carried signs crudely depicting him
as a war criminal or a Hitler clone.
I mention all these instances of ugliness directed at presidents because they are apparently unknown to Andrew Rosenthal, a New York Times
columnist, who caused a stir last week by implying that strident
opposition to Barack Obama is racially motivated, and that it’s all part
of a racist tide building in advance of the November elections. In
fairness, Rosenthal said nothing that is not an article of faith in many
liberal circles, and he at least deserves credit for saying it in the
light of day and naming names. However, it’s still a lazy smear that
twists recent history and is worth refuting.
Personal animus toward political opponents is a venom that has
disfigured politics for a long while and has had little to do with skin
color, but everything to do with self-righteousness and hyper-ideology.
The fringe Right wielded it against Carter and Clinton; the Left wielded
it against Johnson, as well as the younger Bush, Nixon, and Reagan; and
before television and the digital age captured it, the same thing was
done to FDR and Harry Truman. I’ll exercise an artificial statute of
limitations and not dredge up slurs hurled at Lincoln and Jackson, or
the bile in 1796, when Jefferson’s rivals tagged him as an atheist and
Adams’s labeled him a monarchist.
To be sure, some of Obama’s enemies have depicted him in dumb,
outrageous ways. Their bad behavior ought to be denounced, but accuracy
demands that this be done in the context of rejecting the personal
demonization that is par for the course in partisan politics. Rosenthal
does civility a disservice by deploying it narrowly, to make a smear of
his own, and by falsely suggesting that the toxicity in politics is a
right-wing product.
Rosenthal compounds the offense by citing recent rhetoric from Newt
Gingrich and Rick Santorum about poverty, and statements from Mitt
Romney regarding concepts of “entitlement” and dependency, as racially
tinged “code.” The best defense of Rosenthal is to suppose that his
ideas and facts got clipped in the editing room. Otherwise, it’s
inexcusable to accuse Romney of talking in code when he criticizes the
president for promoting an “entitlement society”; as Rosenthal must
know, that’s a familiar conservative trope against liberalism and
expansive government that is arguably older than Obama’s fifty years.
It’s equally obnoxious to cry racism against Gingrich, who has
regularly chided his own party for having a blind spot on poverty, and
Santorum, who supports a pathway for restoring federal voting rights for
convicted felons. Unless Rosenthal denies the appalling fact that
African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated, the effect of
Santorum’s position would be to expand the voting rights of a sizable
class of blacks, especially black men.
I will grant that race is a fiendishly difficult subject to talk
about; that’s why even the well-intentioned stumble. That’s why
conservatives with legitimate bona fides like Santorum and Gingrich
sometimes end up sounding clumsy on the subject. Perhaps it’s why some
Southern white Democrats can lapse into the most condescending jawboning
when they describe their get-out-the-vote strategy for blacks in
unmixed company; or why they were so quick to describe black statewide
candidates in the last several election cycles, from Florida to Georgia
to Mississippi to Alabama, as uniformly “unelectable.” By Rosenthal’s
lights, because they aren’t conservatives, these descendants of
Dixiecrats must have meant well.
There is certainly unconcealed racism on the edges and in the center
of our culture. The many-centuries-old civilizations in the rest of the
world would remind us that Selma is a bat of an eyelash away; and that
Appomattox was virtually yesterday. Rosenthal and a crowd of liberal
critics do no good, however, in describing racial bias as the affliction
of one party and one philosophy. Gutting historical memory to make
today’s political blows seem unique — or, in Rosenthal’s reasoning,
previously “unthinkable” — only adds heat instead of light.
I do wish Rosenthal had remembered the most bald-faced use of race to
win a recent election. It was 2003; the candidate was a man belonging
to a racial minority who was surprisingly leading in the polls in a
governor’s race in a southern state, Louisiana. His opponents produced
flyers with an artificially darkened photograph of the candidate taken
when he was in college, with unkempt hair, which they circulated to the
rural areas that had had once been enraptured by George Wallace. The
stunt worked, and in that cycle, the candidate came up short. It was a
blunt, hard racism that didn’t bother with code. The injured candidate
was an Indian-American Republican named Bobby Jindal, and the people who
knee-capped him were neither conservatives nor Republicans.
― Artur Davis served four terms in Congress representing Alabama’s 7th district.
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