Flagging Support

I know that Howard Dean isn’t a racist, but I also know he isn’t stupid so I’m having a hard time figuring out why he’s said this confederate flag bit more than once. His vaunted campaign staff have let him down mightily if they didn’t school him by now about what an offensive symbol the confederate flag is to the vast majority of Democratic voters and cautioned him to not say it anymore.

This will not do, and it’s not just the flag thing, it’s also that he accuses his rivals of employing the GOP politics of racial divisiveness by criticizing him. He really is the one in the wrong on this and he sounds like a Republican member of the judiciary committee himself when he throws a racism charge at the others in this situation:

a Dean spokesman called the criticism “a desperate political attack on the part of Governor Dean’s opponents.”

Spokesman Jay Carson said Dean was trying to explain that Democrats need to broaden their appeal to Southern men, who in recent years have voted Republican in growing numbers. Carson said Dean has been using the flag line since he started campaigning, and that his rivals misconstrued it as support for the Confederate banner.

Dean also released his own statement to clarify his comments.

“I want people with Confederate flags on their trucks to put down those flags and vote Democratic,” he said in the statement.

“We have working white families in the South voting for tax cuts for the richest one percent while their children remain with no health care,” said Dean. “The dividing of working people by race has been a cornerstone of Republican politics for the last three decades. For my fellow Democratic opponents to sink to this level is really tragic. The only way we’re going to beat George Bush is if Southern white working families and African-American working families come together under the Democratic tent, as they did under FDR.”

I’m more pragmatic than I’ve ever been about presidential politics, and I know that he wasn’t actually endorsing the confederate flag, but antipathy to this symbol is embedded in the DNA of African Americans since the civil war (and liberals everywhere at least since the civil rights movement) so I can’t quite figure out why he would think it was ok to use it. Appealing to racist sympathy, which is what the confederate flag symbol is really all about, cannot coexist with the Democratic party of 2004. It’s not the same as supporting the NRA or being for free trade or once voting Republican. The issue of civil rights is the moral center of our party. It’s not negotiable.

Sure, we must try to boost our appeal in the South, but we must be very, very careful never to do it that way. It’s not only wrong, it wouldn’t work anyway. For every yahoo who wudda, cudda, shudda voted Democratic if we accept the symbol of their (racist) “heritage,” there will be 5 southern African Americans who will just stay home. Even if it weren’t abhorrant on a moral basis, for Democrats, southern racism is a zero sum game.

If Dean meant to say that the party must once again appeal to working class and rural white guys who drive pick-up trucks (which is what I assume he meant) there is absolutely no reason to evoke that stupid flag. How about saying “working men who drive pick-up trucks and watch football on Sunday?” Or, “guys who drive pick-ups and wish they drove Nascar?” There are many, many more southern white men who don’t feel the need to put a confederate flag in their pick-up than there are southern white men who do. Those are the guys we want.

I don’t want to make too much of this (although I admit that I would be very hard on any Republican who regularly opined that he wanted confederate flag wavers to vote for him) but Dean has to stop using this image or risk developing a serious perception problem — not just for being dramatically insensitive to racist codes and symbols, but as a mulish, my-way-or-the-highway, know it all.

That’s what Bush actually is, but Karl Rove has the sense to know that he can’t get elected if people see him that way. Neither can Howard Dean. A little humility is called for on this one.