Jungle Drums
by digby
I wrote a little teaser in my last post about the Republicans’ “cunning plan” to deal with the inevitable reminders of their disasterous handling of Katrina. It’s actually not very cunning and certainly not original.
One word: macaca.
A reader reminded me of a post I wrote last September during the Katrina aftermath called “Dusting off the Manual.” In that post, I noted that TIME magazine was reporting the administration had a three point plan to come back after the debacle which included ginning up the base with tax cuts and votes on embryonic stem cells.
I wrote:
There’s one other little way to gin up base conservative voters that we can already see developing on the shout fest and gasbags shows. But this is one that the leakers know very well mustn’t be mentioned to writers for Time magazine. They are already dusting off their old tried and true southern strategy manual and after more than 40 years it’s like a favorite old song — they just started regurgitating their coded talking points without missing a beat. They’ll need to. This happened deep in Red territory.
On This Weak, George Will basically said that the problem in New Orleans is that blacks fuck too much. Or rather, the problem of the “underclass” can be traced to so many “out of wedlock births.” I think it’s pretty clear he wasn’t suggesting that abortions be made available to poor women. (If Bill Clinton thought he neutralized that line with welfare reform, he was sadly mistaken.) As far as the right is concerned, it’s all about that old racist boogeyman “dependency.” Last night on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan was foaming at the mouth about “the welfare state.” He was in his element, getting his “we’re gonna take our cities block by block” Pitchfork Pat mojo back. These are code words. They aren’t about class — although they will certainly claim that’s what they’re talking about. These are code words for blacks. (And if you want to understand how it’s affected our ability to create a decent liberal government, read this.)
Immigration had already reared its ugly head out of nowhere, and now this. I believe the Republicans already see the elections of 06 and 08 as an opportunity to revert to a tried and true code saturated “law ‘n order” strategy. The War on Terrorism has been losing its juice for sometime — and Iraq is nothing but an embarrassment now. It’s time to go back to what works.
For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he’s racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don’t kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the mason dixon line.
The post went on to discuss at some length the history of race and its implications for politics after Katrina; if you are interested in such arid subjects you might enjoy reading it in full. But I think there are elements of the above observation that we are seeing manifested in what we see lately from Connecticut to Virginia: race baiting.
The master stroke is that the Republicans have managed to get Democratic useful idiots to do their dirty work for them. I was quite startled to see Lieberman use crude racist appeals in Connecticut. It seemed odd and out of place, particularly for Lieberman who has always leaned so heavily on his early involvement in the civil rights movement. It’s certainly not something Democrats have done in many years, even in primaries. But he ran with it hard in the last days of the campaign: his lobbyist friend Richard Goodstein screamed at Lamont at press events to say whether he was a “Sharpton” Democrat or a “Clinton” Democrat and Lieberman himself repeated the phrase. This plays right into Rove’s hands quite elegantly, Clinton being known as the “first black president” and all. Either Lieberman has internalized rightwing racebaiting tactics or he was being advised by his new GOP advisors before the end of the primary.
This was followed by useful idiot number two: Marty Peretz, who added Maxine Waters to the mix of reprehensible blacks who backed Ned Lamont. Again, I find it quite odd that the subtext of this Connecticut contest keeps coming up racial. Something is in the air and I don’t know if Lieberman and Peretz are just breathing it and don’t understand their own racist motivations or if they are literally taking Rove’s advice. What I do know is that they are playing the tune the Republicans want them to play. In the most watched race of the 2006 campaign, racial politics are front and center — and there are no GOP fingerprints anywhere near it. Sweet.
But this racist undercurrent is coming from several directions and serves several purposes. You’ll remember back in March the wingnuts put out some trash talk about impeachment in a naked ploy to intimidate Democrats into backing off a campaign built around holding the Republicans accountable. But there was more to it:
Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.
[..]
Brian Jones, a Republican spokesman, said the e-mail messages generated a higher response than anything the party had sent in several months, including bulletins about the Supreme Court confirmations.
”Clearly on our side it is something that is energizing our base a little bit,” Mr. Jones said.
”This is not about getting things done,” he added. ”This is raw partisan politics.”
[…]
Mr. Weyrich, for his part, acknowledged that the prospect of impeachment seemed far-fetched at the moment. ”It looked bizarre, too, when Father Robert F. Drinan and a handful of others, such as John Conyers Jr. in 1972 similarly were planning for the impeachment of President Nixon,” he wrote in his newsletter. ”When the moment of truth came, they were ready.”
(I guess the impeachment of President Clinton has been disappeared from history…)
Brendan Nyhan noted at the time that the impeachment talk was absurd:
Does anyone actually think the House Democrats would impeach Bush on a narrow party-line vote knowing they will fail to convict in the Senate? Barring some sort of blockbuster revelation, this seems improbable. From Weyrich’s perspective, of course, the facts are immaterial; the point is to get the base motivated, and the prospect of a Speaker Pelosi-led impeachment might be quite effective.
This isn’t just about Pelosi, though (as much as they demonize her, as well.) This is also about the prospect of “certain” Democrats being in charge of important committees. And none other than Joe Klein was there to spell it all out for the cognoscenti and make it clear that the Republicans, as always, have a good point:
The inevitability of race as a subliminal issue in the campaign became obvious as I watched House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, the personification of fluttery uncertainty, trying to defend Representative John Conyers on Meet the Press a few weeks ago… the ugly truth is that Conyers is a twofer: in addition to being foolishly incendiary, he is an African American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped by Republicans. He is one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics in the 1960s, a group “more likely to cry ‘racism’ and ‘victimization’ than the new generation of black politicians,” a member of the Congressional Black Caucus told me.
[…]
Rangel would be one of the most powerful Democrats in the new Congress, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He is regarded as more mainstream than Conyers, well versed in tax and entitlement policies, but he has had an unfortunate tendency to shoot off his mouth in the past. He has questioned interracial adoption, and has compared colleagues who opposed tax breaks for minority broadcasters to Hitler. After Hurricane Katrina, Rangel compared Bush to Bull Connor, the public-safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., who attacked peaceful civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses in the 1960s.
[…]
Conyers and Rangel are embarrassments, but there is nothing the Democrats can do about them — and they are certainly no more objectionable than any number of right-wing extremists who fester in Congress. But it’s not too late for Hastings to remove himself from the line of fire and make clear his support for Harman as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
Conservative Dem Martin Frost wrote an article for Fox News the other day in which he did a rundown on all the incoming chairmen if Dems win a majority. It’s quite an impressive list. He ended his piece this way:
The sky may fall on the Republicans once this group becomes chairmen but it won’t be for racial or ideological reasons. It will be because they will know what to do from day one.
He knows very well what any close observer can see — they are already playing the race card.
Karl Rove and Joe Lieberman’s BFF, Marty Peretz, said it quite clearly: “I’m appalled by some of the people who would become head of Congressional committees.” After his repeated comments about race hustlers, I think it’s pretty clear what he’s getting at and it isn’t a problem with John Dingell. (The General sent Peretz a fine suggestion to bring back “Birth of a Nation” with a Toby Keith soundtrack to get the word out. I wonder if he’s heard back.)
And then there’s Senator George Felix “Macaca” Allen. He’s just a stone racist, but I think it’s worth noting nonetheless that he knew he could play the race card among his supporters in “the real world” of Virginia. You didn’t have to know what “macaca” meant to know what he was saying (and I would guess that more than a few of his supporters know very well what it meant.) His face in that video shows a barely leashed anger, the tight smile, the sarcastic edge — and his supporters all got the point, laughing and tittering at his nasty little aside. Nobody has asked what purpose it served for Allen to point out this guy videotaping the event in the first place. I assume Allen’s supporters thought he was with the campaign not with Webb, and even if they did I doubt they would have thought much about it. But Allen, either out of personal pique or political calculation (or both) brought this lone dark-skinned person to the attention of his audience and identified him with the opposition. He did that for a reason and I suspect it’s because the word has gone forth that race is on the table in this election. (The fact that he’s even more braindead than Bush is what did him in — he pulled it on a guy who was videotaping him. Jesus.)
This is happening because the Republicans are on the run and they have to pull out all the stops to GOTV. Mostly, however, I think it’s an attempt to neutralize Katrina. Let’s face it, there is nothing the Republicans can do to improve their image when it comes to their performance last September. It was a national disgrace and we are going to relive the whole awful scene in living color on the first anniversary. Their only hope is to stoke enough under-the-radar racial resentment to mitigate the damage. I suspect they have been thinking about this for the past year and carefully laying out all the little racist signposts we’ve been seeing over the past few months.
Katrina remains very damaging for Republicans unless they can find some way to kick in the racist lizard brain. They are very good at tickling the primitive, tribal side of human nature — in fact, that’s all they are good at. Subtly and not so subtly playing the race card is one of their specialties and I think it’s pretty much all they have left in their hand to play this time out. (Immigration is another racial card for this cycle although I think it’s really aimed at ’08.)
The question will be whether there are still enough of the old school racists left who will recoil at the idea of the uppity Conyers and Rangel in power. And it remains to be seen whether they can find a way to touch once again that deep, unexamined part of the American psyche that Katrina revealed — not hatred, but fear of African Americans. Fear, after all, is the GOP’s stock in trade.
I doubt it will work. I think we have come too far for racism of that kind to last beyond a single moment. It reared its hideous head briefly during the crisis but I don’t think Rove can bring it back with standard racist appeals. His problem is that it’s all he’s got.
Keep your eyes open, though, for signs of this phenomenon. It’s clear to me that this is the GOP subtext of the election. It’s quite amazing when you think about it. Bush ran as the Republican who was beyond racial politics, known for his outreach to Hispanics and African Americans. But when it comes down to it, racism is really the heart and soul of the modern Republican party, the essence of their electoral strategy and the underlying sentiment that drives their appeals to “tradition” and “religion.” We’ll see if they can crank up the old macaca machine and make it work for them one more time.
Update: in case anyone needs to be reminded of the kind of person who will be reached by these appeals, Sadly No! does a little down home fisking of one GOP stalwart.
.
