Last month, while Trent Lott was busy attempting to extract his foot from his mouth, the Republican Party was in full spin- control mode, hoping to contain the damage to just Lott himself while leaving the rest of the party unscathed. Somewhere along the way, however, conservatives in the media got sidetracked and started talking about the double standard in existence with regards to Democratic Senator and former KKK member Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who recently received criticism, but not to the same degree as Lott, for using the term "white nigger."
On this issue, Republicans are right; Byrd's history is no better than Lott's and his recent comments are no less offensive. But conservative pundits are not talking about Byrd out of righteous indignation. Rather, it is very apparent that the "Republicans have a good history on race" defense eventually had to be dropped in favor of the "Hey, Democrats are bad too, but the liberal media doesn't care!" defense.
Why? Well, you can start with Republican congressman Cass Ballenger of North Carolina, who said of outgoing black congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, "[She irritated me so much] I must admit I had segregationist feelings."
Then there's Rush Limbaugh. "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back," he snapped at one black caller to his radio show. Or for a comment a little more reminiscent of Senator Lott, there's this doozy from his television show in Sept. 1994: "If you want to know what America used to be -- and a lot of people wish it still were -- then you listen to Strom Thurmond." Wow.
This is not to say that Republicans are all racists; rather, the point is that while Trent Lott may not be the rule in the GOP, he certainly is not the exception.
But bigoted comments aside, what is truly troubling about the GOP and race is the so-called Southern Strategy. Richard Nixon used race-baiting to win southern states in 1968 and 1972, and Ronald Reagan began his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three young civil rights workers were murdered in the 1960's, with a call for the defense of states' rights. In 1988, George Bush the elder ran the infamous "Willie Horton" ad against Michael Dukakis. The crux of the ad was that Dukakis let a black man out on a prison furlough who then raped a white woman, so vote for Bush. Lee Atwater, a Republican hit man in the vein of Karl Rove, was one of the masterminds of the ad. As he lay dying of cancer several years later, he admitted that he deeply regretted the ad, saying that it made him appear to be racist, "which I'm not."
Bill Clinton has played the race card too. In 1992, he blew way out of proportion a stupid comment by rapper Sistah Souljah -- she had said that if blacks were going to spend so much time killing their own people, they might as well take a week off and kill whites -- in an attempt to win over white voters. Regardless, Clinton is absolutely right when he says that many Republicans attacking Lott are guilty of hypocrisy. "How can they jump on him when they're out there repressing, trying to run black voters away from the polls and running under the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina?" he asked.
Running black voters away from the polls is not merely something out of the 1890's. In Louisiana's run-off election for the U.S. Senate this past December, a pamphlet turned up in a mostly-black housing project in New Orleans "informing" residents that if there was bad weather on election day, they could wait and vote four days later.
But certainly we could not include "President" George W. Bush in this list of hypocrites, right? Wrong.
After Lott's gaffe, Bush talked about how each day that America was segregated was a day it didn't live up to its promise. In 2000, however, Bush spoke at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, a school that bans interracial dating. Is it also not true that each minute spent by prominent officials at a place like Bob Jones University is a minute spent legitimizing that institution's views? And then there's the primary campaign in South Carolina between Bush and John McCain, in which pamphlets were passed around warning South Carolinians of McCain's "black" child (the McCains adopted a girl from southeast Asia). Did Bush know of this? Since a person is innocent until proven guilty, it would be unfair to assume that he did. But we do know that he was the beneficiary of racist campaigning. And then there's Florida
So, yes, Bill Frist is an improvement on Trent Lott. But if the GOP really wants improvement, it will denounce not only Trent Lott, but Cass Ballenger as well. It will turn down the volume on the radio when Rush Limbaugh starts talking and it will try to win in the South on the merits of its ideas, and not that other way, which must not be spoken of in respectable circles.
