[Mb-civic] Re: [Mb-hair] Race, 1968, Beyond... Bob Herbert in the TIMES....

[Michael Butler]

Jim,
Thanks, You have some real points here and with the article from Bob
Herbert.
I'd like to add some pertinent part of HAIR history:
In my website go to Secrets>Journal>Politics>MEMORIES BROUGHT WITH THE
COMING OF THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION.
Michael

> 
> I always find it interesting how we, correctly, remember how close the
> 1968 election between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon was. (For you
> young'uns--they couldn't call the election, til the next day.) And if
> Humphrey could only have stated that he would not wage the Vietnam War
> in the way LBJ was doing--Humphrey's sense of loyalty prevented his
> personal code of honor from besmirching his colleague, I have no doubt
> Humphrey would have won. (Often unreported today are the vast number of
> votes Nixon gained--particularly among the young!-- by claiming he had a
> "secret plan", to end the War.)  But forgotten is how large the chances
> are that the popular vote numbers would have been vastly larger for
> Nixon, had George Wallace not siphoned off a ton of votes that would
> never have swung to the Democrats...
> 
> Which leads us into this interesting piece in THE NEW YORK TIMES, by Bob
> Herbert--whose stint at THE DAILY NEWS, I still recall, with pleasure...
> 
> Jim Burns
> _____
> 
> 
> Bob Herbert Op Ed ,October 6, 2005
> Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant
> By BOB HERBERT
> 
> A lot of people are upset over comments made on the radio by the former
> education secretary and guardian of all things virtuous, Bill Bennett.
> A Republican who served in the Reagan cabinet, Mr. Bennett told his
> listeners: "I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime,
> you could - if that were your sole purpose - you could abort every black
> baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."
> 
> After making the point that exterminating blacks would be a most
> effective crime-fighting tool, he quickly added, "That would be an
> impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your
> crime rate would go down."
> 
> When I first heard about Mr. Bennett's comments, I wondered why anyone
> was surprised. I've come to expect racial effrontery from big shots in
> the Republican Party. The G.O.P. has happily replaced the Democratic
> Party as a safe haven for bigotry, racially divisive tactics and
> strategies and outright anti-black policies. That someone who's been a
> stalwart of that outfit might muse publicly about the potential benefits
> of exterminating blacks is not surprising to me at all.
> 
> Listen to the late Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the
> evolution of the G.O.P.'s Southern strategy:
> 
> "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you
> can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like
> forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so
> abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these
> things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct
> of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
> 
> "And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But
> I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we
> are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow
> me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is
> much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more
> abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.' "
> 
> Atwater, who would manage George H. W. Bush's successful run for the
> presidency in 1988 (the Willie Horton campaign) and then serve as
> national party chairman, was talking with Alexander P. Lamis, a
> political-science professor at Case Western Reserve University. Mr.
> Lamis quoted Atwater in the book "Southern Politics in the 1990's."
> 
> The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the
> G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections,
> it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white
> voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of
> civil rights and voting rights for blacks.
> 
> The payoff has been huge. Just as the Democratic Party would have been
> crippled in the old days without the support of the segregationist
> South, today's Republicans would have only a fraction of their current
> political power without the near-solid support of voters who are hostile
> to blacks.
> 
> When Democrats revolted against racism, the G.O.P. rallied to its
> banner.
> 
> Ronald Reagan, the G.O.P.'s biggest hero, opposed both the Civil Rights
> Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960's. And he began his
> general election campaign in 1980 with a powerfully symbolic appearance
> in Philadelphia, Miss., where three young civil rights workers were
> murdered in the summer of 1964. He drove the crowd wild when he
> declared: "I believe in states' rights."
> Bill Bennett's musings about the extermination of blacks in America (it
> would be "impossible, ridiculous ... morally reprehensible") is all of a
> piece with a Republican Party philosophy that is endlessly insulting to
> black people and overwhelmingly hostile to their interests.
> 
> But that white racist vote, once so important to the Democrats and now
> so important to the G.O.P., has been steadily shrinking. The U.S. is
> less prejudiced than it was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, which is why
> George W. Bush had to try so hard to disenfranchise black voters in
> Florida in 2000; and why Jeb Bush had to call out the state police to
> try to intimidate black voters in Orlando, Fla., in 2004; and why
> Republicans in Georgia have come up with the equivalent of a poll tax
> (requiring people without a driver's license to pay $20 for a voter
> identification card), which will hurt poor, black and elderly voters.
> 
> Bill Bennett's twisted fantasies are a malignant outgrowth of our
> polarized past. Our job is to keep them from spreading into the future.
> 
> 
> © Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
> 
> 
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