Shorter Erick Erickson: the party running a black man as a serious presidential candidate is totally racist because white people actually vote for candidates other than him.
Some choice bits:
In New Hampshire, white Democrats turned out overwhelming to reject the uppity black man who dared to challenge the Democratic establishment.
“Overwhelming” in this case refers to a difference of two point five percent, the margin by which Clinton beat Obama. I understand that Erick is a Republican and as such is used to thinking that two point five percent is a massive triumph, worthy of, say, a Presidential mandate for whatever George Bush wants, but in the rest of the world, two point five percent is actually a pretty fucking close finish.
But wait, there’s more!
In South Carolina tonight, Democratic voters would rather vote for the rich, Southern, white man than either the black man or the female yankee.
My word, you mean a fairly local candidate from the Carolinas did better than two Northerners? That is unheard of. You know what else? Barack Obama is leading in Illinois! I know! And Hillary Clinton is leading in New York, despite the fact that there are black people in New York City! Alert the (non-biased portion of the) media!
(Also for amusement value: note that Erickson conflates “voters” with “people who aren’t black.” You know, because Obama won South Carolina. But, as has been witnessed before from conservative commentators, black votes are kind of fake, and not nearly so important as nice white voters.)
In fact, exit polling by and large shows that John Edwards, by staying in the race, is taking votes that would otherwise typically go to Barack Obama. Is this a racist ploy? Is John Edwards in league with the Clintons to make sure white voters, who don’t want to vote for Clinton, have a white alternative to go to, lest Barack Obama get more traction?
Now this is bit is just flat-out wrong, and I don’t mean “my god, how dare he utter such things” wrong, but “two and two is five” wrong. Exit polling by and large shows that John Edwards is siphoning away white male voters from Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama. It’s one of the reasons Obama won so hugely tonight: he only got a quarter of the white male vote, but did well among blacks and women, and Hillary lost ground with Edwards scooping up support that otherwise would have gone to her.
And what of the Clintons? Bill is out comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson. In fact, the Clintons have made race a sport in this primary election. They are reminding white Democratic voters that Barack Obama is black.
How can that tactic work? It seems it can only work if Democrat voters are, in fact, racist.
Bill is comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson because Jackson is a polarizing figure, much like Al Sharpton (a figure who, amazingly, has not endorsed Obama yet, and for that the Obama campaign is almost certainly very thankful). Jackson is a corrupt, philandering, self-important dickhead. Yes, racial politics are at play here, and Bill Clinton definitely gets asshole points for trying to link Obama to Jesse Jackson.
But guess what – if Obama is the candidate come the fall, you won’t be able to go two fucking steps without hearing Republican attack ads calling Barack Obama the new Jesse Jackson. (And a secret Muslim terrorist to boot!)
And again: number of black people who have run for President as a Republican: one. Alan Keyes. Who is batshit insane. The Democrats manage to put up credible black politicians in their presidential campaigns; the Republicans, not so much. You know why? Because if you’re going to say that one party or other is definitively racist, it’s gonna be the Republicans. Yes, Robert Byrd is a Democrat. Guess what: Jesse Helms is a Republican. So is Trent Lott. So was Strom Thurmond. So is (etc.)
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I gotta say, I’ve been really disappointed with Bill Clinton of late. He’s been saying some aggravating things, and comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson, even “just as” a polarizing figure (which I don’t know if Obama really is), is pretty risky and pretty unthoughtful of him.
I know there are many factors at work, but I’ve been intrigued by the suggestion of a Clinton-Obama ticket, and then Obama running in later presidential elections, to be ideal for the Democratic Party. Perhaps recent events have shown that Clinton and Obama might not work well, but maybe in an ideal world we’d see the two of them working together, and then Obama using that leverage to run in the near future for president, able to shoot down any experience questions with four to eight years as vice president.
The risk for him, however, I can understand. If Clinton doesn’t perform well and Obama is by her side, it may wreck his chances. I honestly think that Obama isn’t just trying to get the nomination for selfish reasons, I think he genuinely doesn’t think Senator Clinton is well-suited for the role.
Anyway, I’m a bit tired of hearing about the squabbles between Clinton and Obama via television. The American media keeps reporting on it, and bringing in talking heads to say “This in-fighting might keep Americans from voting for any Democrat.” It’s getting more airtime than the current state of the Republican race, which makes me wonder if they’re setting up a self-fulfilling prophesy – making their viewers think there’s a bigger in-fighting problem in the Dems than in the GOP so come election time, folks will think the Dems are too fractured. But that’s just my conspiracy theory…
I think it’d be funny if they tried to play things the other way, and say that if you don’t vote Republican, you’re a homophobe. They might be able to swing a few gullible votes that way. I don’t know how many Democrats are gay, but there’s a lot of Republicans who’ve been in the news as gay. They could even get the NAMBLA vote, easy. I mean, how many Democrats (real Democrats, not ones FOX NEWS labelled Democrat) ever had sex with young boys, and spent time they should’ve been working trying to get young boys naked and engage in some cyber-pederasty?
There’s a lot of untapped potential.
And if America had a gay president, we’d be one step closer to Gay Spider-Man, and a finer world.
And not funny ‘ha-ha,’ but funny ‘wow, I never thought that would happen.’
Good grief! They are serious! Really serious! I was thinking that the article was ironic, at least to some degree; a feeble attempt at irony, yes, but STILL…
And then I read to comments. They really mean it! They really mean that the party which gets some 85-90 of the black vote at presidental elections and have the first serious black presidental candidate is racist. Or perhaps this description is more accurate: They help gearing each other up into believing it.
If they can do that, they have some anger issues, really.
…
You know, considering some fucking Republican sexist started Citizens United, Not Timid, to “show what Hillary Clinton really is.”…I wonder how long before a 527 starts that is six letters long, to show what “Barack Obama really is.”
Every year, the US is coming closer and closer to the nastiness of old 18th and 19th century elections.
And the really sad thing is…they’ll probably convince hard-line Republicans of every word of what that article says by November.
Can’t we all just get along and agree that we need someone in office who has mental faculties above that of a functioning retard (unlike our current Commander-in-Chief)?
What do you expect from American Conservatives besides intellectual flatulence?
These are the idiots that believe that its racist to look at racial differences to detect racial prejudice in the workplace.
These are the idiots that after 200+ years of segregating and marginalizing people of different races and subcultures, they actually believe they’ve finally been vindicated by focusing their hatred towards an organization in the middle east. And surprise, surprise, it just so happens to be a violent, conservative organization that hoards guns, hates women’s rights and validates all their social interactions with the use of an irrational, monotheistic religion. Yet, the way they tell it, you’d think they want the congressional medal of honor for finding a distilled version of themselves.
American conservatives are complete and total morons.
Hmmm, Republicans — a party formed SPECIFICALLY to oppose slavery, a party denied spots on the ballots in Democratically controlled states in the south, a party whose leader issues the Emancipation Proclamation, a party that brought the 13th (no more slavery), 14th (anybody born in the US is a citizen), and 15th (everybody can vote regardless or race or color) amendments (not to mention the 20th re women’s suffrage), tried to introduce anti-lynching and pro-civil rights bills in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act in a far greater percentage than their political opponents.
Democrats — barred Republican candidates in the South before the Civil War, seceded from the Union when a republican was elected, instituted Jim Crow laws at their first available opportunity, had a contender for their party’s nomination who once proclaimed “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”, filibustered anti-lunching and pro-civil rights bills, failed to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the same degree as their political opponents, and later instituted welfare reforms that (correctly) were predicted to destroy lower class African-American families.
Buzz, no one argues that the Republicans were better on civil rights than the Democrats were until the 1960s. The problem is that then, the racist Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party quit and joined the Republicans, and it’s been that way ever since.
Glossing over that extremely important fact when it’s the crux of the two parties’ modern-day attitudes towards civil rights is either completely dishonest or fucking stupid. Which are you, then?
Buzz, thank you for the dose of political humor for the day.
After all, who opposed the Civil Rights Act? It was Democrats like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond… oh, wait, that’s right, they’re REPUBLICANS now.
And let’s not forget, it was the Nixon strategy of winning the South through racial splitting that became the Republican modus operandi for the next 40 years. Last I checked, Nixon was a Republican, as the Southern Democrat racists fled in huge numbers to the Republican party and found a nice safe haven from 1968 to the modern day.
But it’s nice to know that you can produce facts that are, in truth, completely irrelevant to the situation at hand. Or to put it another way: If Lincoln were alive today, he’d be a Democrat. 😉
(Hey, the GOP manages to co-opt Truman all the time, fair is fair…)
And that’s why he’s the Mightygodking. Beat me to it. 🙂
Buzz, I don’t think that there are many who argue that the nineteenth-century history of the Republicans does not do them more credit than that of the Democrats, when it comes to race.
Until the nineteen-sixties, the Republicans still enjoyed considerable support from blacks. I am quite sure that I’ve read that Martin Luther King voted Republican until Kennedy started to support him. Things started turning around then, with the Republicans turning to the right and the Democrats going leftwards. Also, many of the bitterest Democratic opponents of the Civil Rights movement turned towards the Republicans then. (Strom Thurmond being a well-known example).
But in our day and age, black vote massively for the Democrats. If I am not mistaken, Bush got around 10 % of the black vote in the last two presidental elections. Obvioulsy, blacks do not feel that the Republicans are doing anything for them, but instead prefer the Democrats. Also, Democratic Barack Obama is the first serious black contender in the primaries of any of the two parties.
Even if we grant your claim that Democratically designed wellfare-reforms actually damage blacks (and supposedly other underpriveliged people) it doesn’t show that the Democratic party is fundamentally racist, which is what Erickson claims. And I cannot imagine blacks being so utterly ill-informed that they could be decieved into voting for a racist party by a 9-1 margin.
It’s worth remembering that even if we assume Buzz’s claim about welfare reform being fundamentally racist to be true, that said reform only passed because Clinton triangulated his policy towards current Republican mores so they would pass something they would like.
I didn’t grant the assumption that the welfare reform was racist, but only that it had damaged black families. (Though my guess is that he didn’t mean Clinton’s reforms). I don’t believe that welfare has damaged blacks, but merely wanted to focus on the accusation of racism – I cannot see why even a damaging welfare reform is an argument that someone is racist. Misguided, yes, but not racist.
Beat me to the Dixiecrats thing. Dixiecrats are to modern Democrats what I am to Eskimos. Which is to say, nothing at all.
And this kills me:
“In fact, exit polling by and large shows that John Edwards, by staying in the race, is taking votes that would otherwise typically go to Barack Obama. Is this a racist ploy? Is John Edwards in league with the Clintons to make sure white voters, who don’t want to vote for Clinton, have a white alternative to go to, lest Barack Obama get more traction?”
It’s racist to split the white vote and further strengthen Barack?
What?
Blacks voted Republican overwhelmingly in every election from getting the right to vote until 1932, when they voted for Hoover; in 1936, they switched en masse to FDR in support of the New Deal, and have stayed that way ever since, a connection only bolstered by the civil rights movement, and Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson.
MGK — Which part appointed two African-Americans as Secretary of State?
I am neither dishonest nor stupid. And I’m well mannered to boot.
BTW MGK, the welfare reform I speak of was LBJ (have we got enough TNA’s in this msg?) and his Great Society legislation, which even a liberal like Daniel Patrick Moynihan denounced at the time it was introduced as destructive to lower class families, African-Americans in particular (I forget the step-by-step Moynihan did to explain why it was going to hurt African-Americans more, but it had nothing to do with there genes but rather the incipient racism still prevalent in American society at the time).
2nd BTW: Full disclosure re Harry S Truman — he was a member of the KKK. Then again, so was Warren G. Harding, no neither party can claim clean hands on that account.
Truman’s relations with the Klan are subject to dispute (as are Harding’s).
Regardless, Truman was a strong advocate of black civil rights as President (the first, really, since the end of Reconstruction to take a strong interest in the matter).
Hot Damn! Two entertainingly clueless conservatives to watch in one blog post–first Erickson, and now buzz!
Yeah, the Republican Conventions are like catching a Utah Jazz game at home.
The only African-Americans are on TV. 😉
But keep talking buzz, you only make yourself look stupider with every word.
Truman did a lot to further the cause of integration and civil rights, without a doubt.
So did Eisenhower (he was the one who used Federal troops to enforce desegregation at Little Rock) but he doesn’t get any credit because he was a Republican.
malakim, can you factually refute anything I have posted?
One could argue that the Republican party simply doesn’t care about race on either a societal or personal basis. Plenty of them marry across racial and ethnic lines, and a majority of Hispanics voted for Regan and both Bushes (not to mention Asian-Americans as well). They’ve nominated an African-American supreme court justice (same as the Democrats) and two African-American secretaries of state (as opposed to zero among the Democrats).
One could also argue that far too many Democrats are obsessed with race, sometimes to the detriment of the very people they claim to want to help.
As for me, I think the six survivors in the two parties primaries are all qualified to hold the office. Huckabee is too shifty for my tastes, ditto Edwards, but either Romney or McCain would be good candidates for the office.
Hillary Clinton has the brains to be president, but I don’t think she has the correct temperment for the job and — fairly or unfairly — she certainly brings enough baggage to stock a Samsonite store. While I’m not in favor of either Feinstein or Pelosi’s political ideas, I think either of them would fill the office of president far better than Hillary could.
Obama is the first genuine 21st century candidate. He’s the only one who can plausibly claim to bring a new attitude and a new tone to the office, not more politics-as-practiced-since-1968 (with the possible exception of Romney and even there it’s a matter of a lesser degree, not a complete absence).
Do I like all of Obama’s ideas? No, but I don’t like all of anybody’s ideas. I think Obama can help ratchet down the abusive rhetoric and concentrate on solving problems rather than accerbating them for political gain.
I don’t think we should ever elect another baby boomer to public office again.
Buzz, just because Moynihan thought the Great Society programs wouldn’t help black people doesn’t mean he was necessarily correct. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a lot of things, and indeed a great thinker, but he made mistakes. Decrying poverty legislation was one of his big ones.
The poverty rate for black Americans fell from 55 percent in 1964 to 27 percent in 1968 – that’s a cut in half in a single presidential term, and it dropped further yet to 21 percent during the end of the Carter years before rebounding upwards to 27 percent again by the end of Reagan’s terms.
Now, you can argue that perhaps poor white families were helped a bit more, disproportionately speaking, than black ones were – there’s some statistical evidence to back it up, although depending on which statisticians you read they might just be demographic burps. But suggesting that black families were hard done over by the Great Society push is simply lunacy.
malakim, can you factually refute anything I have posted?
Depends, can you factually refute anything I posted, about the state of the Democratic party AFTER the Civil Rights Act? 🙂
Was the Democratic Party the party of the South, until the 1960s? Yes, they were. I don’t think anyone is debating that point. However, after the Civil Rights Act, the Dixiecrats migrated en masse to the Republican Party, exploited in a strategically brilliant if disgusting way by Nixon with his Southern Strategy in 1968 and 1972. This trend continued with Reagan in 1980, Bush the Elder in 1988, and Dubya in 2000/2004. Why do you think that LBJ commented, “We have now lost the South for a generation” when he signed the Civil Rights Act? (And technically, more like 2 generations.)
The Republican Party, like it or not, is no longer Lincoln’s Grand Old Party. I doubt he’d even recognize it if he witnessed it today. And the Republican Party was not formed to end slavery. The Republican Party was originally formed (until it was co-opted by corporations with the Industrial Revolution) to be the party for the free white working man. Slavery was not evil, to the party line, on moral grounds. It was unfair competition. Of course, once pro-business interests started taking over the party, much to the chagrin of populist Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, then it started going downhill for said labor interests, who also migrated to the northern Democratic party.
This reminds me of a line from Bulworth, of all things: Poor white people have more in common with poor black people than they do with rich white people. Something to think about.
MGK, what Moynihan correctly saw was that simply handing money out without a corresponding requirement for some sort of effort on the part of the recipient/s would make it easier for men to abandon families. That has cut across the color line, though African-American families, for a variety of internal and external societal reasons, took the hit first. It also happened in white Appalachia and in other communities.
Easy money from welfare also sparked an illegitimacy boom among lower class girls and young women, not because anybody got rich by being a “welfare queen” (to use a horrid label that was unfairly applied) but because being a single mom granted a young woman independence from her own mother/parents.
It became a spiraling trend: Children from single parent homes where the mother never married the father are more likely to create their own single mother homes. Children from single parent homes — particularly where the parents have never been married (as opposed to orphans or the children of divorce) — do less well in school, are more likely to develop emotional problems, are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, are less likely to form stable long term relationships, are more likely to be involved in crime, have more health problems, and die earlier.
This is not to say every child born of a single parent family is condemned to such a fate, or that children from stable two parent homes can’t fall into it, but it’s the way the smart money bets.
(Children of divorce tend to have more of the above problems than orphans, and orphans tend to have more than children from stable two parent families, but the ones who get hit the hardest are the ones from single parent homes.)
I don’t think anybody in the Johnson administration was rubbing their hands together and cackling fiendishly with glee over the thought of destroying the lives of millions of people born and unborn; quite the contrary, inf fact, I’m sure they were all convinced they were doing some noble Greater Good, but that’s the way the cookie ended up crumbling.
re African-Americans’ income going down over the Reagan years, that’s because so many of them in the Carter-Nixon-Johnson years opted out of formal education; it is well documented that younger African-Americans often find themselves pressured by their peers not to “act white” by doing well in school, which only encourages a high drop out rate. Those who did matriculate to institutions of higher learning often made career choices that froze them out of higher salaries. African-Americans who hold degrees in hard sciences tend to do as well as their non-African-American counterparts. Those with degrees in what is referred to as liberal arts (no slam intended against political liberals) do less well than non-African-Americans with similar liberal arts degrees.
We shall leave the arguments for what might/might not cause that for another time.
buzz, I don’t have the time or inclination to go into everything you just wrote.
However, you are at least eliding, if not misstating, the facts when you say that Daniel Patrick Moynihan opposed “welfare” because “simply handing money out without a corresponding requirement for some sort of effort on the part of the recipient/s would make it easier for men to abandon families.”
He opposed the imposition of a “man out of the house” prerequisite for the Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. That was not because it was an entitlement without a corresponding requirement – it wasn’t. It was a counterproductive rule that said, if a two-parent family was applying for AFDC payments, that family could not be composed of a man and woman living in the same house; and AFDC actually policed recipients’ houses, to ensure that there wasn’t a two-parent family receiving aid in violation of that rule. THAT is the aid that critics charged created an incentive to not get married, or for men to abandon their families.
AFDC was ALSO criticized for subsidizing dysfunctional families, and creating a disincentive for women to become employed. That was primarily the argument that an entitlement without corresponding performance requirements played into – and one that could be levied against almost ANY social entitlement program, including unemployment, social security, veterans’ benefits, etc.
(I would stipulate that you can argue that the “man out of the house” rule was a complicating factor in determining whether the disincentive argument held water – by creating a stimulus to only have 1-parent families, the program thereby made it significantly more difficult for the parent receiving aid to get a job if she was so inclined.)
Jim, I don’t think Moynihan was against the idea of some form of public charity to help those who needed help and were — for whatever reason – unable to help themselves. I think he thought the proposed changes would unleash untold havoc and guess what, he was right!
As I said, I didn’t want to address everything you said – I didn’t intend that to be a point-by-point refutation of what you wrote, or even for it to be some argument with one point as a means of bringing down your entire thesis.
I just specifically remembered the “man of the house” rule from college research, and wanted to clarify the role that played in undercutting that specific entitlement program.
Jim, let’s not argue point by point. How about we agree on this: Nobody wants children to starve or live in unstable households. It’s in everybody’s best interest to make the vast majority of citizens emotionally stable, because that means fewer problems and more tax revenues,
Let’s stop demonizing one another as liberal and conservative; one of the most appealing things about Obama is that he genuione seems to be capable of stepping beyond that. Let’s finmd a way to help people become stable and self-sufficient.
Yes, Robert Byrd is a Democrat.
And Byrd, unlike just about any Republican I can think of, has acknowledged, recanted, and apologised for his racist past.
Republicans really need to move on from trying to use Byrd as cover for their racism. You barely need to scratch the surface of that argument to show how utterly riddled it is with holes.