THE NEW RACE-BAITERS
LABASH, MATT
THE NEW RACE-BAITERS by Matt Labash THERE WAS A TIME, NOT LONG AGO—before Bill Clinton became our first black president— when the Democratic party was a domicile for racist demagogues like George...
...What happened in Missouri happened in black precincts across the country in the days before the IT SOUNDED LIKE MISSOURI DEMOCRATS WERE DOING BATTLE WITH THE klan, NOT MILD-MANNERED REpUBLICAN SENATOR KIT BOND...
...Strangely, none of these monitors was actually sent to the states that the DNC had complained about in its press release...
...President Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the Justice Department reinforced it on the homestretch...
...The civil-rights act in question was a 1992 state bill that would have permitted sex-harassment suits to be brought in Maryland courts instead of federal courts...
...the "complaints" that launched the investigation, he says he can't say exactly who made them...
...election...
...While King "had a dream for all children," voters needed to take care not to "let Republicans take that dream away...
...On the Saturday before the election, the DNC voiced suspicions, based on vague "reports," that Republicans would be engaging in "voter intimidation" to suppress turnout by minorities...
...The White House referred queries to the DNC...
...What, privately, does he call African-Americans...
...This was quite a stretch...
...The cards read, "A Voteless People Are a Hopeless People...
...Just like he did during Election '98...
...As for STRANGELY, NONE OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENTS MONITORS WAS SENT TO THE STATES THAT THE DNC HAD COMPLAINED ABOUT IN ITS PRESS RELEASE...
...With an assist from adman Robert Shrum, himself no stranger to employing Klan imagery when taking on Republicans, Glendening carpetbombed Sauerbrey in TV ads that claimed she voted against "the civil-rights act" and that she had "a civil-rights record to be ashamed of...
...But when I inform Ratcliff that the state party said the ad came from the DNC, she backpedals: "I don't know...
...Vote smart...
...I think what the ad really says is, if you vote Democratic, you're voting for tolerance...
...And on the Sunday before the election, Clinton played his part...
...Stranger still, after the election, no instances of minority "voter intimidation" were reported...
...Why...
...Four or so others came "from state representatives, Congress, but I can't elaborate further...
...So over-the-top was Glendening's claim that he was even repudiated by his uneasy ally, Baltimore's black mayor Kurt Schmoke, who refused "to participate in a campaign to try to persuade people that she is a racist...
...What, privately, does he call Jews...
...Up the eastern seaboard, Maryland's Democratic governor Parris Glendening destroyed Republican challenger Ellen Sauerbrey, though they'd spent much of the campaign in a dead heat...
...Senate...
...That is, until Glendening played the race card three weeks before Election Day...
...No excuse was too piddling for injecting race into the campaign...
...By videotaping voters under the guise of guarding against fraud...
...Fitzgerald's lived in Illinois his whole life...
...Consider the Illinois Senate race...
...One came from a Congressional Black Caucus member...
...Much of that effort was what the pros call "off radar...
...Untrue, unless video poker, which Ford plays nightly and Beasley opposed, is a civil right...
...When you don't vote, you let another assault wound a brother or sister...
...Nowadays, the Democratic party is . . . well, it's still a haven for racial demagoguery...
...But then it warned the listeners of the black radio station on which it aired: "When you don't vote, you let another church explode...
...Fresh examples of race-baiting were close at hand, though they wouldn't have fit the morality play in which Republicans seek to divide by race, while Democrats urge harmony and inclusion...
...In Georgia, when Republican gubernatorial candidate Guy Millner called his white opponent "Lawyer Roy Barnes," Barnes suggested that people "who have stereotypes...
...While the media were tracing the etymology of "putz-head" and debating at great length whether Al D'Amato's Yiddish coinage amounted to an ethnic slur against Chuck Schumer, Democratic leaders went on a barely noticed race-baiting rampage to turn out African-American voters...
...The ad thumped Republicans for the usual sins: despising Social Security, enriching the wealthy with tax breaks...
...So eager were Democrats to deal the race card that even blacks weren't immune to charges of racism...
...Most, he says, were "concerned with the videotaping," although, he adds, "videotaping itself doesn't constitute a violation" of the Voting Rights Act...
...Beasley, who fought his own party by advocating the removal of the Confederate flag from the capitol dome, lost by seven points in a state where blacks constitute 20 percent of the electorate...
...Because, Ford charged, "Beasley and his Republicans" were about to "take away 50 years out of the civil-rights movement...
...for folks like lawyers, generally have stereotypes for other minorities...
...In order to protect minority voters, the Justice Department announced that videotaping voters "could constitute a violation . . . of the Voting Rights Act...
...One of Fitzgerald's staffers had passed out campaign literature at an anti-tax rally organized by Thomas Fleming, an advocate of Southern secession who edits the magazine Chronicles in Rockford, Ill...
...we may have helped them with it...
...Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...It sounded like Missouri Democrats were doing battle with the Ku Klux Klan, not mild-mannered Republican incumbent Kit Bond, who was endorsed by the local NAACP and would end up coasting to victory with a third of the black vote...
...He says Justice didn't find any widespread impropriety, though it wouldn't go public if it had—unless it was filing suit, which it isn't...
...When you don't vote, you allow another cross to burn...
...Not surprisingly, Missouri Democratic party chairman Joe Carmichael turns slippery when I ask him if it's fair to depict Republicans as cross-burning church-detonators...
...I would challenge the Republican party to stand up and stop it...
...The image was of a virginal, corn-haired daughter of Dixie, sitting stiffly on the beach, surrounded by seven leering black boys...
...This is not American, this whole voter-intimidation business...
...What's more, in response to unspecified complaints about the possibility of "voter intimidation," Reno said the department would dispense 141 federal observers to five states...
...In an interview with a reporter after "worshiping" with Maryland Democrats at a black church in Baltimore—one of several interviews the newly accessible Clinton did with black reporters that weekend—the president declared that "to scare people off from voting is totally abhorrent...
...How would they do this...
...As for the president, reinvigo-rated by his success at turning back the Republicans' un-American voter intimidation, he may want to reprise his 14-month long Initiative on Race...
...The bill was killed by a Democratic majority, and even Maryland's black House speaker voted it down...
...The DNC didn't know whether any instances had occurred, but congratulated itself on its preemptive vigilance...
...Targeting every residence in his mostly black district in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, Wynn mailed Election Day get-out-the-vote cards that featured German shepherds and baton-wielding cops bullying blacks in Bull Connor's Alabama...
...That was also the line of DNC chairman Steve Grossman, when he admitted the ad was "wrong" on a pre-election Crossfire show...
...DNC spokeswoman Melissa Ratcliff, on the other hand, says, "It was a state party ad...
...In South Carolina, black Democratic state senator Robert Ford campaigned with a vengeance against governor David Beasley, the Republican incumbent...
...In fact, none of the 141 observers was even sent to monitor "voter intimidation...
...Why Americans, millions of whom are videotaped daily withdrawing cash from the bank and buying Twinkies at the 7-11, would be intimidated by a polling-place video went unexplained...
...Consider the ad Missouri Democrats aired on behalf of their Senate candidate Jay Nixon...
...Because "Republicans are so desperate, they are willing to resort to any-thing—even voter intimidation—to keep Democrats from passing laws that help our community...
...What was her justification for painting him as a neo-Con-federate extremist...
...Black congressman Albert Wynn managed to top even Glendening's over-the-topness...
...Justice Department spokesman Will Mancino is the only person offering anything approaching an answer...
...So far off radar, in fact, that on election night one network, in a short story on negative campaigning, actually dredged up the 1990 Jesse Helms ad, in which a pair of white hands wad up a job application after losing out to an affirmative-action hire...
...Why...
...But there was no need to haul eight-year-old video out of the vaults...
...Incumbent senator Carol Moseley-Braun produced an ad juxtaposing Republican Peter Fitzgerald with an image of a Confederate flag...
...When reporters tried to substantiate this "voter-intimidation business," and almost none did, White House spokespeople and the DNC were hopelessly vague on the details of the Republican plot...
...In the Ft...
...In an ad that ran 28 times between October 30 and Election Day on Columbia's largest radio station, Ford accused blacks who didn't come out to vote against Beasley of being "no different than the Ku Klux Klan...
...Is This The Image You Want...
...THE NEW RACE-BAITERS by Matt Labash THERE WAS A TIME, NOT LONG AGO—before Bill Clinton became our first black president— when the Democratic party was a domicile for racist demagogues like George Corley Wallace...
...In Wallace's 1970 race for governor of Alabama, his supporters circulated thousands of leaflets cautioning, "Wake Up, Alabama...
...Nonetheless, on the day before the election, the Justice Department entered the election campaign with a Nixonian flourish...
...The campaign to provoke racial hysteria was not just local...
...Attorney general Janet Reno declared, "We will not tolerate harassment of minority voters...
...It was an ad that was produced by the Democratic National Committee," he says...
...Instead, according to the fine print on the Justice press release, they were sent to Native American and Chinese communities to make sure bilingual ballots were provided...
...Vote Democratic for Congress and the U.S...
...Worth, Texas, district of Democrat Martin Frost, the county Democratic party sent black households flyers featuring a picture of Martin Luther King next to another picture of an angelic little black girl...
...The one where he said something about trying to "be one nation together," to "move beyond division to community," to "get people together across all the racial . . . lines that divide America...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 11
