Whitewash - By Frank Rich

[DonViejo]

Whitewash

The party on the brink of destroying the Voting Rights Act reminds us that Republicans were really the great civil-rights leaders all along.

By Frank Rich Published May 5, 2013

When you start talking about race and the Republican Party, Republicans tend to say the following things. First, they tell you that most Republicans are not bigots (true) and that Democrats can be bigots, too (also true). Then you’re reminded that during the decades when southern segregationists made their home in the Democratic Party, Republicans were instrumental in founding the NAACP, in 1909; a Republican chief justice (Earl Warren) presided over Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954; a Republican president (Eisenhower) called in troops to desegregate Little Rock’s schools, in 1957; and another Republican president (Nixon) created the first federal affirmative-action program with teeth. (All true.)

Then you ask, what about today? You’re told that Newt Gingrich calling Barack Obama “the food-stamp president” and Sarah Palin’s invocation of “shuck and jive?” were just ephemeral campaign-season gaffes from sideshow clowns soon to get the hook. Rush Limbaugh’s perennial race-baiting? Yesterday’s news. Mitt Romney’s alliance with the off-the-rails birther Donald Trump? Just clueless Mitt being Mitt. Those sightings of racist placards at tea-party rallies? Cherry-picked, planted, or invented by the liberal media. And besides, the Democrats have their own history of race-baiting ranters—queue up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s greatest hits on YouTube.


The only fact that can’t be easily batted away by defensive Republicans is that actual black Americans almost never vote for Republicans in a national election. What’s up with that? Why have they been so ungrateful for the good works of Warren and Ike, year after year? Today the answer to that question matters more than ever. In the Obama era, the spike in GOP efforts to pursue policies punitive to minorities is unmistakable. State and local governments in every region have been in a race to enact restrictive new voting laws. Congressional Republicans are adamant in preserving the sequestration cuts for Head Start, Job Corps, and unemployment insurance, even as they carve out a self-serving exception for air-traffic control. Next month, a conservative-dominated Supreme Court is poised to eviscerate a crown jewel of civil-rights law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, at a time when, if anything, it should be expanded to address the growing obstacles to voting in ever more jurisdictions: long lines, the mischievous purging of voting rolls, and new registration requirements redolent of the Jim Crow South.

Paradoxically, this is all happening as the GOP makes a big postelection show of trying to jettison its image as an all-white party hostile to almost every minority group in the nation. The GOP chairman, Reince Priebus, announced a $10 million outreach plan to minorities. Congressional leaders, gobsmacked by the discovery that Hispanics were more inclined to vote Democratic than to “self-deport,” have manacled themselves to Marco Rubio and started slouching toward immigration reform. A smattering of Republican senators and Fox News personalities has even joined the Democratic stampede to “evolve” on same-sex marriage. And African-Americans? Well, that’s now, as always, where it gets truly embarrassing.

full article
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/republicans-civil-rights-2013-5/

[graham4anything]

1. Once again, Frank Rich is 100% correct.And why the 80-20 again comes into play.

This also ties in with a very early President Obama article in 2008 and 2009
that said about all those who don't or didn't back the President, the same thing

yes, it is about race.
and the first part of the paragraph above shows even the alt-media liberal side does the same thing.

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/republicans-civil-rights-2013-5/index2.html


Yet the most insidious and determined campaign to rewrite racial history on the right has come not from yahoo political hacks but from a coterie of writers who pop up at relatively highbrow conservative publications like The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The Weekly Standard. Their work, often underwritten by conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, feeds the politicians their source material. Some of these writers’ spurious output makes it into the so-called liberal media as well, including that of Gerard Alexander, an AEI “scholar” who published a piece titled “Conservatism Does Not Equal Racism. So Why Do Many Liberals Assume It Does?” in the Washington Post in September 2010. Alexander, the author of a previous Weekly Standard article defending the GOP as “the party of civil rights,” wrote in the Post that “many white conservatives swoon when members of minority groups proudly share their values” and that “the old conservatism-as-racism story has outlived all usefulness and accuracy.” Oh, really? In just the six months before his article appeared, a short list of conservatism-as-racism stories would include Andrew Breitbart’s attempted high-tech lynching of the black Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod; the epithets hurled at the civil-rights hero John Lewis, among other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, in a mêlée on the Capitol grounds; and a “parody” letter by a Tea Party Express spokesman in which the “NAACP head colored person” called Lincoln the “greatest racist ever.”



The history that such Republican water-carriers want to blot out was succinctly summarized recently by the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz: “Everybody knows that in 1964, a proud southern Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, pushed hard to secure the civil-rights bill, with the aid of a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans. This sent the defeated segregationist southern Democrats (led by Strom Thurmond) fleeing into the Republican Party, where its remnants, along with a younger generation of extremist conservative white Southerners, including Rand Paul, still reside.” The only part of this that is not true are Wilentz’s first two words: In our amnesiac country, everybody does not know what happened 50 years ago, which is why the revisionists have an opening to fill the vacuum.



And so we have Kevin Williamson’s essay “The Party of Civil Rights—It Has Always Been the Republicans” (in National Review last year) asserting that the rise of the GOP in the South in the sixties was mostly about economic issues, the Vietnam War, the counterculture, law and order, and anti-communism, because race was then in “decline” as “the most important political question.” (That decline may have been less evident to black Southerners of that time who witnessed, among other seminal events, Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1965 and the King assassination in Memphis in 1968.) Williamson also stated that Goldwater’s vote against the 1964 civil-rights bill was only that of a “principled critic,” as opposed to that of a candidate pandering to segregationists in southern states, five of which just happened to go Republican that year for the first time since Reconstruction. In a new National Review essay last month, Williamson goes further still, portraying Goldwater as a civil-rights hero next to the “low-rent” LBJ.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

2. I witnessed racism within the Democratic Party firsthand during the primaries. Liberals/Democrats

can be racists, too. Go glad Frank pointed that out.

It seems that the Democratic Party has been a little divided ever since. There are many people who can't and will never get over the primaries.

[BlueCaliDem]

5. I've witnessed the same thing. Many hold President Obama to the strictest standards they would never

dream of holding a White Democratic president - like Carter or Clinton.

Yes, the primaries flushed these Liberals/Democrats out for all to see, but it's nothing new among the Black and Latino demographic. They know why some Liberals/Democrats are anti-Obama and it has nothing to do with his policies.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

6. You are so right!! I wanted to say it, but was too cowardly. Thanks!!

[BlueCaliDem]

8. You're welcome! eom

[pscot]

3. Why history matters

You might want to repost this in Good Reads. Excellent article.

[DonViejo]

4. Done. Thanks for the recommendation! nt

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

7. Absolutely, and it is especially a good lesson for those who continuously want to make the idiotic

comparison between Obama and FDR, JFK, LBJ. Why can't he be like them, they ask? Not only is it a silly question, it is historically and politically inaccurate.