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

[Jim Burns]

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