David Brook's quest to be hack king of all DC pundits took a big step with his ridiculous column "History and Calumny," in Friday' New York Times. The smug. smarmy Brooks insinuates that historians and columnists (most notably Times colleague Paul Krugman) are pushing some bogus notion that modern Republican racist politics began as Ronald Reagan began his general campaign in 1980 by appearing in a Mississippi town that was known only to the outside world as the location of a brutal murder of three civil rights workers in 1964.
Brooks' reasoning that Reagan was no racist is pathetic. You see, Reagan was making speeches to blacks all week before he formally kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss.in August, 1980 with a speech that pandered the GOP's Southern Strategy with an appeal to states rights.
According to Brooks, confusion in the Reagan campaign was the reasoning for the speech at the Nashoba County Fair taking place before a scheduled visit to the Urban League to visit then-wounded Vernon Jordan in the hospital and to court inner city black votes.
If that is so, Brooks column exposes the fact that the GOP was even more racist than pundits like Krugman are claiming. So instead of the charge of calumny sticking, Reagan and the Republican Party instead decided to begin the event in a town where people were killed trying to register black people to vote just by coincidence. If you believe that, then surely the sailors put up that pesky Mission Accomplished banner and not an advance team from the White House.
Clearly, Reagan made a conscious decision (he was still relatively un-senile in 1980) to open his campaign in a racist white enclave in the Deep South. The underlining message in his state's rights speech is basically that uppity blacks (James Cheney)and liberal New York Jews (Michael Schwoerner and Andrew Goodman) got killed for interfering with state's rights.
At the same time, Brooks notes that Reagan was trolling for votes in Democratic cities in the Rust Belt by appealing to their hatred of "welfare queens," busing, and other perceived ills of integration by these mostly white blue collar and mostly ethnic voters.
Blogger Dan Kennedy has an excellent piece that includes a sampling of media coverage of Reagan's speech. Newsweek (Aug. 18) was particularly salient:
"Reagan's courtship of the black vote last week started out in a way that made many blacks suspcious. Speaking to an nearly all-white crowd at a county fair in Philadelphia, Miss. — the town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 —he spoke in favor of states' rights, the code word for segregation in the 1950'."
The criticicism of the Reagan campaign in the Washington Post th following month was even more brutal.
"Philadelphia, Miss., was the worst place in the world to mention 'states' rights.' Whatever the term might mean to Ronald Reagan now and whatever it might mean to others, it means something else to Jimmy Carter. It was always a code phrase for racism. It did not mean that the state had some sort of right to tell the government to shove it when it came to occupational safety. It meant, bluntly, that the state could deprive blacks of their civil rights and there wasn't a thing the federal government could do about it."
Andrew Young, in Ohio on behalf of his former boss Jimmy Carter, said Reagan' speech, 'looks like a code word to me that it's going to be all right to kill niggers when he's President.'. " according to the New York Times (Oct. 15, 1980).
Brooks closed his column insinuating that Krugman and other liberals were lazy because he (Brooks) was able to find the information doing the Google on the Internets in 10 minutes. If it took him that long, he's stupid because I found the information to debunk his charge of calumny in less than a second.
Moreover, despite what Brooks what have you believe, only the most extreme fringes of wingnuttia believe the tripe that Reagan didn't run a racist campaign. It was the pander of panders to appeal to the good ole boys in Miss. It was beyond transparent to attempt to simultaneously pander to a black audience while reciting code to a willing audience that longs for the annual blossoming of "strange fruit."
Look we can argue over the degree of racism by Reagan and his administration. Let's just say, the policies under Reagan were decidedly not pro-black or minority. IMO Reagan was middle of the pack racist but a political opportunist all the same.
Morally, his endorsement of racist dogma during the campaign if it was a pander is in many ways worse if that was his conviction, which I am not certain it truly was.
Far from bashing Krugman, Brooks proves yet again what a schmuck he is. A liberal columnist with his track record of ineptitude and falsifications would be fired. He also bashed a fellow colleague, which is a cardinal rule in journalism. That would be bad enough, but for him to insist that Krugman and others are committing blood libel against the ghost of Ronald Reagan is pure and utter horse shit.
Even worse, is the complete lack of scholarship in Brooks to justify his intellectually lazy argument that Reagan wasn't really racist and the recent Republican Party is built on said Southern Strategy. Brooks claims, with a straight face mind you, that the Democrats also must be racist because Mike Dukakis campaigned at the same fair in 1988. That may be true, but I know the Duke did not give a coded speech to pander to the confederate flag crowd.
Given the trends in the Census and how recent elections in the Mountain West have been leaning Democratic, the Republican Party in the future may be an enclave of southern states. Montana and Colorado were once solidly Republican but that was then...Wyoming and Idaho were once thought of as what Massachusetts is to the Democratic Party: guaranteed wins.
That is no longer the case as 2006 showed that the Dems gained traction in some crucial house races, narrowly losing in Wy. The longer Wide Stance Craig stays in the Senate, the better the odds for Larry LaRocco to steal the seat. At the very least, the Dems force the GOP to spend money where there was not even token opposition in the past.
Which brings us to the current state of the Republican Party. Given the naked xenophobia with the misinformed notion of "amnesty" hispanic voters will be flocking if not toward the Democratic Party, but clearly away from the Republicans.
Racism has and always will be a modern strategy in the Republican Party. They got to where they are because of racism and they just can't change overnight...or maybe they don't want to.