THE NATION'S PULSE : The Party of Race
Lord, Jeffry
THe nATIon’s Pulse The Party of Race by Jeffrey lord B ill clinton was furious. Campaigning in the South Carolina Demo-cratic primary for his wife’s presidential cam-paign, the former...
...That Roosevelt not only deliberately excluded a significant portion of black workers from coverage by Social Security, he flatly ignored Republican pleas to support anti-lynching legislation...
...Will the New York Times ever become color-blind...
...Long before FDR ordered Japanese-Americans into internment camps, ten Democratic platforms raged against Chinese and “Asiatic” immigration because they were “a race not sprung from the same great parent stock...
...Georgia Democratic Congressman John Lewis, a hero of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, leads an 44 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 JeffReY loRD annual “Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage” to the sites of the period such as Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery...
...Yet all three of these government institutions, along with others, came into being as part of the overtly racist bargain that elected “progressives” Wilson and FDR...
...Twenty-five, more than half, have defended slavery, hissed at “negro supremacy,” demanded fealty to segregation or expressed hostility to the Fifteenth Amendment, opposed anti-lynching laws and abolishing the poll tax...
...A Reagan White House political director and author, he writes from Pennsylvania...
...Reaction to Clinton’s ruse in liberal circles was shock, followed by outrage...
...They are America’s party of race, winning two centuries’ worth of elec-tions for every office from president on down first by inciting the passions of underclass whites, then cynically switching to doing the same with blacks, all APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 43 THe nATIon’s Pulse the while defiantly advertising the vilest of their obsessions with race as they keep both groups poor— and angry...
...O ther than smug conceit, what, after all, is the essential difference between the New York Times, editorializing in 1900 about “the menace of the rule of blacks,” and the obsession of now-disgraced Times editor Howell Raines with the race of Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was discovered in 2003 to be plagiarizing and fabri-cating news stories...
...Will Bill Clinton become the last Democratic president to play the politics of race...
...This is, of course, why the civil rights bills of the 1960s were passed—as a “redo” of what Democrats had undone or blocked for a century...
...Yet there are significant omissions on the tour...
...So too was race the obsession of Mike Nifong, the elected Democratic district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, who prosecuted the Duke rape case...
...Plainly put, the progressive history of the mod-ern Democratic Party was purchased at the expense— the violent expense—of black America...
...Jeffrey lord is the creator, co-founder, and CEO of QubeTV, a conservative online video site...
...The implication was clear: Clinton was blatantly fanning the fires of racist politics, trying to transform Obama into an upscale Jackson or Al Sharpton, stampeding blacks into the Obama camp while alarming whites about the perils of electing a black man as president...
...Of the three post-Civil War Democrats elected presi-dent before Harry Truman began changing the par-ty’s position on race—Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt—all came to power on the strength of an unholy alliance with rabid Southern racists, the party’s racial hang-ups on vivid display in the coincidentally named White House...
...Shelby Steele, the author of the new book Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, says that blacks in academia are expected to have “a chip on your shoulder” simply because of race...
...Democrats have written 42 national political platforms since the first in 1840...
...Asians simply wouldn’t fit in because they were “servile races, unfitted by habits, training, religion, or kin-dred, for absorption into the great body of our people...
...Some of the names of those who paid the price for this history are well known, from the savagely murdered Emmett Till, to Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, the three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 Mississippi...
...Jackson, a cartoon of the black racial polarizer, was the first black to carry the South Carolina primary...
...One hundred years after that racist Times edi-torial, race was still the standard at the Times...
...As with Raines, Nifong’s obsession with race instead of the facts cost him his job, ending his legal career with a jail sentence tacked on for good measure...
...New York was so infested with delegations composed of Ku Klux Klansmen it was dubbed the “Klan Bake...
...Obama’s campaign aide David Axelrod, a former sup-porter of Bill Clinton’s, seethed to the UK’s Guardian newspaper that “he did not think Clinton’s com-ments were chance remarks, adding that the former president had a great political intellect and chose his words carefully...
...THe nATIon’s Pulse The Party of Race by Jeffrey lord B ill clinton was furious...
...There is no stop at the Democratic National Com-mittee, the governing body of the party that counted National Committeeman Bull Connor as a member at the same time he was busy unleashing police dogs and fire hoses on the blacks marching in Birmingham...
...Will pigs fly...
...Will the success of Barack Obama prompt Democrats to apologize in their Denver platform for two centuries of racism...
...In addition to the brutality of slavery and the inhumanity of segre-gation, there was the horrific violence of thous-ands of lynchings for which there are records only between 1882 and 1968...
...That Wilson, a “progres-sive,” was barely in office before he implemented a government-wide segregation of the federal govern-ment...
...ObamaisthefirstAfrican-American candidate to have a serious shot at the presidency...
...The three were killed fighting against the same race-based psychological state of mind endorsed by the New York Times: “the menace of the rule of blacks...
...It wasn’t just black Americans who caught the fury of Democrats...
...Would Democrats agree to Bartlett and con-servative columnist Charles Krauthammer’s idea for a “grand bargain”—slavery reparations in return for abolishing the racial agitation that is affirmative action...
...Angered, Kennedy abruptly joined niece Caroline Kennedy in a very public endorsement of Obama...
...White Democrats Al Gore, John Edwards, and Clinton himself have won the South Carolina pri-mary and carried the black vote...
...It is but the tip of the iceberg to note that Cleve-land signed legislation in 1894 eviscerating what was left of the comprehensive civil rights bills passed by Republicans after the Civil War that had not yet been undone by the Supreme Court...
...The New York Times reported Senator Edward Kennedy and Clinton had a “heated” phone call over what Kennedy felt was Clinton’s “injection of race” into the campaign...
...As Clinton’s reflexive remarks vividly illustrate, this psychology of race is the unspoken family history ingrained in the psyche of modern Democratic politics—a heredity that simmers just below the surface not only with Clinton but with his camp followers in modern liberalism...
...Campaigning in the South Carolina Demo-cratic primary for his wife’s presidential cam-paign, the former president fumed that Hillary Clinton’s opponent, Illinois Senator Barack Obama was “getting votes because of race...
...From Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton, Democrats have championed every form of race-based politics on the spectrum, from slavery to segregation to racial quotas...
...This would be the same Klan that historian Eric Foner described as “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party,” and whose members were once said by FDR to be among his “best friends and supporters...
...There is no visit to the Washington headquarters of the Federal Reserve or the home of the federal income tax, the Internal Revenue Service, or the Social Security Administration in Baltimore...
...This psychology of race is blatantly evident in another arena where liberals hold sway...
...The 1924 Democratic National Convention in The 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York was so infested with delegations composed of Ku Klux Klansmen it was dubbed the “Klan Bake...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 45...
...This seems to be exactly what occurred with 88 members of the Duke faculty who leapt to the conclusion the white lacrosse players were guilty because, in the words of one African-American professor, the play-ers were of “the dominant race...
...Smooth, smiling, casual, his later answer to a reporter’s question about why it was taking both Clintons to defeat Obama in South Carolina was pre-ceded by a short laugh: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolinatwice...
...Bartlett’s book is a disturbing look at the Democrats’ race-baiting psychology as practiced in its most abomi-nable forms for centuries...
...FDR banned blacks from White House press conferences and kept his Warm Springs retreat segregated...
...According to Blair’s immediate superior, race was “the decisive factor” in the young reporter’s promotion by Raines, even after a warning that Blair’s work was of such poor quality that he should be stopped from writing for the Times “right now...
...These frequently ignored facts and much more have been very instructively compiled by Bruce Bartlett, author of Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (Palgrave Macmillan...
...The unasked question is why anyone would be surprised at this...
...All three appointed flagrant racists and Klan members to everything from the Supreme Court to Cabinet positions...
...Clinton didn’t cite them, he cited Jackson...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
