Republicans are singing the golden oldies
A tweet from Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars caught my attention just now:
The GOP once again is deploying familiar racist tropes involving crime, immigrants, and scary black people in its campaigns this fall. They’re singing the golden oldies. They have no new material and nothing positive to offer.
“The GOP is partying like it’s 1988 — the year that scary pictures of a felon they called Willie Horton and grainy images of Black crime saved a party equally devoid of actual policies,” Will Bunch writes in his Philadelphia Inquirer column:
Turn on your TV set — especially here in my home state of Pennsylvania, where a once seemingly dead-in-the-water Mehmet Oz has revitalized his Republican Senate campaign against Democrat John Fetterman — and suddenly the 2022 midterms are all crime, all the time.
But it hasn’t been enough for Oz and his deep-pocketed backers to summarize Fetterman’s work on much-needed criminal justice reform in two words — “pro-criminal.” Oz and his supporters like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have even gone after Fetterman’s trademark tattoos — ironically, since most mark his commitment as mayor of Braddock, Pa., to end murders there — and falsely implied that Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor was once in bed with a gang, the Crips.
“People do it because they think it works,” Bill Clinton told Jon Stewart in 2004 about Republican appeals to racist animus. “And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.”
They’re still doing it.
Bunch continues:
Two things are happening here. One, of course, is that crime is legitimately seen as a problem by millions of voters. The pandemic — which both seriously eroded the wider social fabric but also saw a surge in gun ownership — triggered a nationwide short-term spike in homicides and some other categories of violent crime, especially in cities like Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Although there are already signs that crime is subsiding in many locales, the public perception — aided by the reality of high-profile incidents like last week’s fatal shooting after a football scrimmage at Roxborough High School — for many is that law and order has broken down. My contacts who’ve canvassed voters in white working-class areas like older rowhouse streets in South Philly tell me crime is the only thing on some voters’ minds.
Yet hypocrisy abounds. There is the hypocrisy that — much like inflation — the Republicans (or most Democrats, for that matter) aren’t offering solutions beyond the continued insanity of hiring more cops, despite a lack of evidence that this actually reduces crime as opposed to the harder work of neighborhood intervention. There is the hypocrisy that a surge in gun ownership — with more than 20 million new firearms sold during the pandemic, many to first-time buyers — aided by GOP opposition to gun control was arguably a bigger factor in the murder spike than any Democratic policies. And there is the hypocrisy that candidates like Oz’s Pennsylvania running mate — gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano, who aided Donald Trump’s fake-elector scheme — or Wisconsin’s Johnson, also tied to the Jan. 6 plotting now under federal investigation — are the actual “pro-criminal” candidates.
McCain made a huge mistake, Clinton said, by not calling out the George W. Bush campaign over racist attacks in South Carolina in 2000 that he had fathered a black child (he and his wife had adopted a girl from Bangladesh).
The country has changed, becoming more diverse and more open since 2000, Bunch notes.
And yet the GOP still refuses to do anything for YOU — the middle-class American who struggles with things like stagnant wages, or incomprehensible college costs, or medical bankruptcies. They can only win elections in the 21st century by pitting you against THEM, by protecting you from “The Other.” That means the crudest dehumanization of people.
The GOP attacks on Fetterman are racist and immoral, Bunch writes, yet “tragically but inevitably … working all too well with an election little more than one month away.”
Fetterman had best not repeat McCain’s mistake.
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