Off to the Races
Barnes, Fred
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 24, NO. 10 / OCTOBER 1991 Fred Barnes OFF TO THE RACES The Democrats love to play racial politics, and they've come up with some ingenious— if uncandid—reasons for...
...After four years of honest-butdull, Louisiana was ready for a return to the flamboyant style of a governor 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991...
...The refusal to discuss real issues of social disorder has "eroded the political credibility of liberalism and the Democratic party," he writes...
...Then he proceeds to say almost nothing candid or honest on the subject...
...Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent REVENGE OF THE COONASS KING starring Edwin Edwards/Buddy Roemer with David Duke/Clyde Holloway and a Cast of Thousands (PG-13) The Coonass King is, of course, Edwards, who after his upset win over Bennett Johnston in the 1971 governor's race leaped on a table to crow, "The Coon-asses have done it...
...On October 19, in livid color with Dolby sound, comes the rematch...
...Adds Brown: "Most white politicians were afraid to examine why blacks were unable to climb the economic ladder as had countless immigrant groups beforethem...
...lb punctuate his point, Bradley added, "If you don't believe me, ask any African American who tries to hail a cab late at night in an American city...
...Thornburgh cited the provision of the bill that would all but force employers to hire blacks and other minorities in the same proportion they constitute in the local job pool...
...Bienvenu a Hollywood South: New Orleans as a movie lot, tinsel on the Spanish moss . . . T hey cluster in their off-hours— '. producers, directors, actors, gofers —at nouvelle Cajun eateries like the Pelican Club in the Quarters and the Palace Cafe on Canal Street, to talk of angles, grosses, edits, contract points—Beverly Hills Polo Lounge chatter over their crawfish etouffei while on the streets outside, on past the spillway, into bayou country and beyond, the ultimate local diversion, a governor's race, warms up...
...You wait and see," he told reporters...
...The trend described by Edsall and Brown provides the backdrop for the 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 struggle between Bush and Democrats on the Civil Rights Act and race...
...Dear Mr...
...Neither is Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona governor who's normally known for his painful honesty, not self-censorship...
...Bradley tried this tack, too...
...It's widely and accurately perceived by whites as a quota bill...
...He's waited four long years...
...Brown asked him why he and other white presidential candidates in 1988 didn't criticize Jesse Jackson...
...Bush did have one stern piece of advice: "If you don't like it being called a quota bill, change the bill...
...He writes that Democrats follow the "ostrich theory of politics" when confronted with evidence that race-tinged issues are driving away white voters...
...Tell us more about how you grappled with the moral imperatives embodied in race relations and how you clarified the moral ambiguities that necessarily are a part of the attitude of every American who has given it any thought—any thought at all...
...Whites haven't had much trouble figuring out that Democrats care more about blacks and the poor than about them...
...When Bush and John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, got involved in the civil rights debate, it wasn't for honest policy reasons...
...That Edwards qualifies as a Coonass on his mother's side—yet has the surname, appearance, and Pentecostal credentials of an Anglo—has helped him bridge the gap between the state's Protestant north and Catholic south like no Louisiana politician before him...
...House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, in a speech last December, included Bush among Republican right-wingers who "are following a new trail of racial resentment and recrimination blazed by David Duke, then trod [sic] successfully by Jesse Helms, and now given a tarnished patina of intellectual respectability by William Bennett...
...EDWARDS (jauntily): That's so people like you, with nothing between their ears, can understand...
...Bush is hiding something...
...They fear that "public discussion would legitimize white disenchantment" with blacks, disenchantment that Democratic leaders see as white racism...
...21.95...
...The Goldwater campaign demonstrated that the GOP could "appeal to whites opposed to racial integration" without being racist...
...2Regnery Gateway...
...This includes the sainted Longs, Huey and Earl, who were given to lying to bayou audiences about their "Catholic grandparents...
...This is patent nonsense, as Bradley well knows...
...Edsall says he's given up the notion "that the decline of liberalism was .. . simply the result of well-financed conservative elites dominating the political process...
...From somewhat different ideological angles (Edsall is a liberal and Brown a moderate, as best I can tell), they come to the same conclusion: that race and race-related issues (quotas, busing, crime, welfare, illegitimacy, the rights revolution) spurred, or helped to spur, the political realignment that has produced five Republican victories in the last six presidential elections...
...He trashed Bush for vetoing the Civil Rights Act in 1990 and said the Bush era has brought about "the worst racial climate in forty years...
...There's a name for that sort of hiring practice—quota...
...Let's talk about buzz-words...
...rown is even tougher on Demo- 1011 crats...
...Democrats refused to deal with the whites' deepest frustrations and the Republicans grew adept at responding to them," Brown writes...
...Middle-class whites believe their views aren't racist, but merely realistic, based on their own encounters with crime, welfare, etc...
...Maxine Waters of California and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting delegate from Washington, DC., pressed the point aggressively...
...But then I've been surprised before...
...He proposed a summit conference of Republican and Democratic leaders, the press, private citizens, and no doubt himself, to "prepare guidelines for proper conduct...
...All races must learn to speak candidly with each other," he said...
...But in 1987, along came Charles "Buddy" Roemer, with his Harvard business school degree and promises of sweeping reform...
...New Orleans IT n soggy May, on the Cole-Haan loafer heels of the crew shooting Storyville (starring Jason Robards, James Spader), Oliver Stone arrived, Kevin Costner in tow, to film JFK—everything the Warren Commission didn't tell us about the Kennedy assassination...
...They ignore the problem...
...Both the Black Caucus and the white Democratic leadership in Congress are tied to the bill for reasons of ideology, liberal guilt, and obeisance to the civil rights lobby, the most powerful of the Democratic special interest groups...
...Of course not...
...They'll suffer politically even if the bill passes...
...This wasn't Fletcher's first hit on Bush...
...We believe we have a commitment from the President for a cease-fire in the war of words...
...So Jackson "was entitled to have the fullness of the moment without being subjected to the sort of nit-picking standard we were all applying to each other...
...Speaking of dividing people on racial grounds and stirring hate, how about this...
...Gore insisted he'd seen this type of politics before in the South...
...Civil Rights Commission warned ominously against "the use of irresponsible campaign tactics that only serve to divide the nation along racial lines...
...The irony is that most of the people who voted for George Wallace or David Duke or George Bush because of race haven't benefited economically from the last decade," Bradley said...
...I don't get the connection...
...the Congressional Black Cau14,) cus credit for candor...
...They've come up with some ingenious arguments why Bush should go along: • Bush is a racist...
...Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, a liberal chest-thumper, says Bush better not try to "Hortonize" him...
...Edsall says there is "pointed liberal avoidance of these issues," or what he calls "self-imposed Democratic myopia...
...That word is quota...
...Whenever economic hard times threaten middle-income families and lowermiddle-income families, those who do not want any kind of economic initiative to change the situation start yelling race...
...And they agree that the realignment continues, as it will indefinitely if Republicans continue to receive new opportunities to exploit antipathy to racial quotas in hiring and promotions...
...On July 22, Chairman Arthur Fletcher of the U.S...
...Don't do this, Bradley said...
...reason ason is the liberal taboo on T suggesting the black community might be responsible for any of its own problems...
...He explained that he'd decided to "speak out about things I feel," not just things he knows...
...he's anti-civil rights, an enemy of racial progress, a rouser of bigots like David Duke...
...ALouisiana governor's race, like an 0liver Stone movie, demands a willing suspension of disbelief of those who watch it...
...The President "emphasizes diversion and distraction and symbolism and showmanship...
...This is morally reprehensible...
...We no longer speak honestly about race in America...
...George Bush is President of the United States who would divide this country by race for his own political benefit," declared Democratic presidential candidate Paul 'Thongas in a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, on July 28...
...Meaning, the Cajuns have elected one of their own as governor—"coonass" being a jocund if not especially endearing pejorative for descendants of the Acadians who settled the bayou region in the early 1800s...
...Three times Edwards has won the governorship, twice in the 1970s and again in 1983...
...Nor will the press...
...That they won't do...
...Does he cite any pathologies of the underclass that frighten whites and spur the race issue...
...By the way, I assume the phrase "glacial collective humanity" is Bradley's, since he told Morton Kondracke that he wrote the speech himself over seven hours one Saturday afternoon...
...Do you believe ignoring the division between the races will heal it...
...So he'd better cave on the Civil Rights Act to restore his aristocratic honor...
...Democrats certainly aren't going to bring it up...
...I think Edsall overstates the racial aspect of the realignment, but to his credit he doesn't throw the word "racist" around loosely...
...Flashy ex-governor Edwin Edwards, an old-style bayou politician, squares off against New Age incumbent Buddy Roemer, whose conversion to the Republican party is by no means his strangest move of late...
...Let's talk about quotas...
...We can do better...
...The Willie Horton ad was an attempt to demonize all black America...
...Democrats got support from a Bush appointee on the issue of Bush's campaigning...
...Afterwards Norton claimed victory "We asked the President essentially for a cease-fire, a negotiated settlement, a cease-fire in the war of words that we think stood in the way of getting the Civil Rights Act of 1991...
...Babbitt said the other candidates "shared my sense of pride" that Jackson's candidacy "was a piece of history...
...He's entitled to the benefit of a double standard," Babbitt said, because "there has been so much racism in this society and so much willingness to belittle blacks...
...I'd say Jesse Jackson tried to make the same point when he called Bush's harping on quotas a "decoy...
...352 pp...
...Well, anyway, Gore said Bush's reaction when presented with real domestic problems is to say, "Let's talk about not burning the flag...
...They wanted Willie Horton back for their own politics," Tkongas alleged...
...President, tell us how you have worked through the issue of race in your own life," Bradley said...
...Democrats want Bush to act like that...
...Democrats have much to gain if Bush is muzzled...
...As examples of "inflammatory racial rhetoric" to be avoided, Fletcher cited the Horton ad and the TV commercial of Jesse Helms in 1990 attacking the same racial quota provision that Bush has criticized...
...He says that Republicans became racial conservatives, Democrats racial liberals, and that the GOP benefited greatly from the contrast...
...As such, it's a wedge issue, pulling lower-middle-class and suburban whites from the liberal coalition that elects Democratic Presidents and pushing them into the cross-class conservative coalition that elects Republicans...
...It was unfair, yes, but nevertheless no contest, either in the debates or at the polls...
...That's what Bradley said in a second speech on July 16 to the National Press Club...
...W. Norton...
...Bush would spare himself attacks, but the GOP would pay a price...
...The stakes are high...
...But if Bush doesn't raise the issue in his 1992 campaign, it won't be part of the election dialogue...
...In 1960 it was, Brown says, "the most Democratic suburban county in America...
...What's in it for Bush...
...I'd be surprised if he did...
...Now, based on your remarks about the 1991 Civil Rights Bill, you have begun to do the same thing again...
...Democrats are desperate to silence Bush and make the quota issue disappear...
...Senator Al Gore of Tennessee is hot on Bush's case here...
...This threat may not sound like much to Jesse Helms, but to Bush, with his keenly felt idea of himself as the friend of blacks, it's a lot...
...It was a shortcoming the King made the most of in their televised debates...
...The significance of the quota issue is reinforced by two new books on race and politics: Chain Reaction: The 1m-pact of Ram Right% and fixes on American Politics,' by Thomas Byrne Edsall of the Washington Post (with Mary D. Edsall), and Minority Party: Why Demoarits Face Dcfeat in 1992 and Beyond,2 by Peter Brown of the Scripps Howard News Service...
...Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, in a speech on July 10 brimming with synthetic anger, said he "can't accept" the tactic of inflaming the working-class with racial animosity to win an election, then using one's political power to boost the rich, not average folks...
...Bradley is no exception...
...For one thing, a halt in accusations by liberals and the media that Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...10 / OCTOBER 1991 Fred Barnes OFF TO THE RACES The Democrats love to play racial politics, and they've come up with some ingenious— if uncandid—reasons for George Bush to go along with them...
...Bradley is breathtaking in his hypocrisy on this point...
...The closest he comes is to say, "Liberals have failed to emphasize hard work, self-reliance, and individual responsibility" Does he say anything about the real issues that have driven whites from the cities to the suburbs...
...And the race issue "could be used to break the economic class base of the New Deal Coalition among white voters, forcing an ideological shift to the right among a group once deeply committed to the redistributive and progressive agenda of the New Deal...
...Showmanship from Bush...
...Fashion, style—the singular quality, as Huey's biographer T. Harry Williams saw it, that sets Louisiana's tradition of political corruption apart from that of other states...
...President, in 1988 you used the Willie Horton ad to divide white and black voters and appeal to fear...
...In 1988, Bush won two-thirds of Macomb's votes...
...The state's unique view of democracy as an ongoing entertainment—a morality play with laugh lines—goes back to Reconstruction, when a colorful but venal carpetbag governor, Henry Clay Warmoth, was impeached and blamed his troubles on the local environment: "Corruption is demoralizing," complained the Illinois-born Warmoth, "but it is the fashion down here...
...416 pp...
...They worried they might be called racist if they said drugs, welfare, and crime were disproportionately a black problem...
...22.95...
...Bradley is clever at appealing to Bush's blue blood...
...He'll hit back...
...When eighteen of its twenty-six members (all Democrats except for Gary Franks of Connecticut) met with President Bush in the White House on June 25, they urged him to stop using the one word that drives them crazy...
...It's not good for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 13 the country...
...If you truly want it healed, why don't you spend some of your political capital represented by your 70-percent approval ratings and try to move our glacial collective humanity one inch forward...
...Bush is a traitor to his class...
...Louisiana voters, north and south, look for style in a governor, and they're willing to pay for it...
...For the first time in his political career, the Coonass King tasted defeat...
...Few say so explicitly, but when they throw his name in with David Duke's, the implication is clear...
...Democratic pollsters have found that white voters care enormously about affirmative action and quotas, and that the percentage in favor is close to zero...
...Liberal Democrats made matters worse for themselves by refusing to take the concerns of whites seriously on "race-freighted" issues...
...Not quite...
...Issues like crime, out-of-wedlock births, welfare dependency, drug use, low labor-force participation, the lack of black entrepreneurs, and so on...
...TREEN (dourly): You're talking out of both sides of your mouth...
...It's hard to imagine anyone falling for such stuff, but that didn't stop Bradley...
...Bush didn't do a lot of talking, and he made no commitment...
...The result is the transformation of places like Macomb County Michigan, a working-class Detroit suburb...
...He left it to then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to explain what the administration specifically doesn't like about the Civil Rights Act...
...He seeks to shame Bush into believing that his high-toned claims about loathing racial discrimination are hollow...
...Nor is this a modern phenomenon—despite the misconception that Huey Long was the first of Louisiana's picaresque politicians...
...Indeed, Edwards's victory in 1983 was a triumph of style over substance, coming at the expense of an incumbent, David Treen, who had run the governor's office as a wholly serious enterprise...
...Bush will use any dirty, lowdown trick to win election...
...Bush won't talk frankly about race and poverty...
...The Civil Rights Act is a loser for them...
...So they've adopted a strategy of trying to persuade, shame, or frighten Bush into giving up the fight against affirmative action...
...Instead he spots "the beginnings of what amounted to a racial realignment of the two parties" in 1964...
...Victor Gold THE COONASS KING AND THE GURU The 1991 gubernatorial race heats up in Louisiana...
Vol. 24 • October 1991 • No. 10
