This week's column by Frank Rich, titled "In Defense of White Americans," is a satisfying one for me to read. I'll elaborate after the jump, but want to start with his conclusion:
[Conservative warriors like George Allen, John McCain, and Sarah Palin] see all Americans as only white or black, as either us or them. The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.
George Allen, a name we have not heard all that often in 2008, is a key figure in Frank Rich's conception of the flailing Republican campaign. Allen, as we remember from a couple of years ago, was a popular former governor and sitting Senator representing the state of Virginia. He was also touted as a favorite for the Republican presidential nomination. He just needed to get past his re-election to the Senate and the big-dollar donors seeking another charismatic social conservative to succeed Dubya were ready to line up and fund Allen.
We know what happened next. Allen's bigotry was exposed on YouTube for all to see as he slurred a Jim Webb staffer (an American of Indian heritage) by calling him "Macaca" and welcoming him "to America and the real world of Virginia."
Allen's "real world of Virginia," the Virginia that was home to the capitol of the Confederate States of America, would throw him out on his ass a couple months later, ending his quest for the White House. An intelligent set of politicians might have learned from his experiences and opt for less bigoted rhetoric than the now Ex-Senator. The Republican Party of the 21st Century, however, does not seem to have an active set of intelligent politicians. As Rich argues, he set forth a dichotomy that the GOP ticket continues to use: Real Americans, and Others. "Real" is a code word for White, for Rural, for Christian, for Conservative. "Other" is code for, well, any of us who don't fit that description.
That didn't work so well for Allen in 2006. And it isn't working for John McCain in 2008.
It's not as if his campaign isn't trying. Sarah Palin's talking about how nice it is to be in what she calls the "real" America of small towns where you see "pro-American" sentiment -- as opposed to what? The Commie-terrorist urban havens like New York City and Washington DC? Those places that al Qaeda attacked seven years ago? Apparently they aren't part of the real America in Palin's vision of the nation.
And Palin isn't alone. McCain spokespuppet Nancy Pfotenhauer said last week that McCain was winning in the "real Virginia," a Virginia that doesn't include the fast-urbanizing NoVa region where many now live -- including the young man George Allen called "Macaca" just two years ago. That Virginia, for Pfotenhauer, doesn't count, maybe because not enough of its residents are intolerant of people darker than a Klansman's sheets, or more urban than the Know-Nothings of the late 19th century.
That's a horrible vision of America for a couple of reasons. One, it is a vision that excludes the majority of Americans. This has not been a majority-rural nation since the 1920 Census of Population first declared that more Americans lived in cities than on farms. It is a vision that ignores that this nation has been built and continues to be built by people of many heritages, people whose ancestors may have come for opportunity or by force, people who have contributed to this nation's power with sweat and sometimes blood. People without whom this "real America" would be far weaker in so many ways.
That critique was implicit in Colin Powell's stirring endorsement of Barack Obama and indictment of the Republican Party last Sunday. The most memorable aspect of General Powell's statement was his discussion of the sacrifice that Kareem Khan made for America in Iraq at the tender age of twenty. Kareem Khan, whose faith was Islam, rests with his fallen comrades who practiced Christianity, Judiasm, no religion, or other beliefs. They are all patriots. They all made the ultimate sacrifice for the America they loved.
That's one reason the Allen-McCain-Palin vision is horrible. Another is this: It assumes that white Americans -- and rural, white Americans -- are by definition scared, intolerant bigots whose political identities depend on preserving their racial supremacy. How insulting. And how utterly, utterly inaccurate.
As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist. It’s past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense.
That includes acknowledging that the so-called liberal media, among their other failures this year, have helped ratchet up this election cycle’s prevailing antiwhite bias. Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the press’s default setting has been to ominously intone that "in the privacy of the voting booth" ignorant, backward whites will never vote for a black man.
Granted that is an elitist New York Times columnist (and, horrors, former theater critic) making the case for the tolerant rural white American. But it has a basis in fact. Without states like Iowa, Idaho, Wyoming, and North Dakota, Barack Obama does not become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Yet despite this empirical evidence, pundits keep hammering on "the Bradley effect," a supposition that whites won't tell pollsters they won't vote for a black candidate out of fear of being called racist. Nevermind that effect -- if it ever existed -- has shown no signs of existing this century. The idea of it reflects a knee-jerk racism trumping all else for white voters.
Rich goes on at great length about how the idiotic coverage of white voters is leading to what promises to be John McCain's Waterloo -- a last-ditch effort to win the Pennsylvania McCain sees as having voted for Hillary Clinton because it was afraid of Barack Obama. Nevermind the massive Democratic voter registration edge in the Keystone State this year. Nevermind the polling numbers that show Obama consolidating Clinton's primary supporters into regular double-digit leads over McCain in the final weeks. Because beer-drinkin', bowlin' real Amurikans live in Pennsylvania, clearly the electorate is suspectable to fearmongering about that King of the Others, Barack Obama.
Good luck with that, John. Gallup's last national poll of 13,000 voters has Barack Obama holding the largest share of white voters of any Democratic candidate for president of the past 32 years, and he has room to win a majority of whites, something no Democrat has done since 1964. McCain, by contrast, might become the first Republican since Goldwater to lose the white vote.
Canvassers and reporters are starting to observe a phenomenon that surprises them. People who actively hold racist views, and use racist language, are openly supporting Barack Obama. (Those of us following Illinois politics for a while know that Obama has achieved this before, in his Senate race. And years earlier, Mayor Harold Washington taught openly racist whites that maybe an African-American politician might actually be a good leader in the city of Chicago.) Rich brings this point back to the Pennsylvania of the primaries, namely Philadelphia. He also brings it back home for Obama, to the multicultural America that is Hawaii.
The original "racist for Obama," after all, was none other than Obama’s own white, Kansas-raised grandmother, the gravely ill Madelyn Dunham, whom he visited in Hawaii on Friday. In "Dreams From My Father," Obama wrote of how shaken he was when he learned of her overwhelming fear of black men on the street. But he weighed that reality against his unshakeable love for her and hers for him, and he got past it.
When Obama cited her in his speech on race last spring, the right immediately accused him of "throwing his grandmother under the bus." But Obama’s critics were merely projecting their own racial hang-ups. He still loves his grandmother. He was merely speaking candidly and generously — like an adult — about the strange, complex and ever-changing racial dynamics of America. He hit a chord because many of us have had white relatives of our own like his, and we, too, see them in full and often love them anyway.
But George Allen didn't get that. John McCain doesn't get that. And Sarah Palin doesn't get that. They don't see love. They see fear and division between "us" and "them," where bigotry can get whites to vote for capital gain tax cuts to billionaires while farmers can't afford cancer screenings or perscription drugs.
That ain't working too well for them. We can hope that a thrashing at the polls will end this toxic strain of Republican bigotry that has grown since Nixon's Southern Strategy won him the White House in 1968. The indicators as we enter the final days of the campaign are very encouraging. Strong poll numbers for Obama, both nationwide, and in states that voted for Bush like Colorado, North Carolina, and Virginia. Colin Powell's denuncation of the bigotry in his party has been echoed by other moderates in the party, moderates like the former governors Arne Carlson and William Weld, both of whom have endorsed Obama.
As the days grow short for this bigoted campaign, conservatives like David Frum are growing increasingly gloomy. In the Sunday Washington Post, Frum argues that the Republicans should abandon McCain and focus on saving as many Senate seats as possible, because "Our resources are limited, and our message is failing. We cannot fight on all fronts. We are cannibalizing races that we must win and probably can win in order to help a national campaign that is almost certainly lost."
Frum's gloom aside, there is still time for something to change people's minds. Unlikely, yes, but possible. And the greatest danger, as all of us who remember the giddy highs in the days after the Iowa caucuses that showed growing New Hampshire leads for Senator Obama only to be brought back to earth on the evening of January 8, is complacency. But a strong push in the closing days of this campaign can help slam the door on the divisive, insulting politics John McCain bitterly clings to in his desperate bid for executive power.
The ingredients for a realigning election, the kind of election that could mark the first great break in American politics since the rise of the conservative coalition over the past forty years, are in place. But there is work to be done to ensure that the persuadables and the persuaded get to the polls and vote. Reports from the early voting states are encouraging, but most people still vote on Election Day. Making sure they do may make the difference in how states like Georgia go in the presidential race, and how literally dozens of Congressional seats (including Senate seats in Minnesota, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Alaska) go.
Not much time left. Canvassing, and phonebanking, and other GOTV activities left to do. Every one of us is valuable, no matter where we live. As New Mexico General Election Manager Matt Kasdan said today:
What you allow us to do by being on the phones is to put all of our troops and volunteers here in state at the doors, which is the most important - the face to face communication... By allowing us to focus on the doors, we've been able to collect thousands and thousands of vote-by-mail applications and now we're able to push everyone out to the polls. Election Day has already started for us [with Early Vote]. You've allowed us to amplify our efforts with what we're doing here on the ground. It's just been a huge, huge help.
Victory is within our sights. Let's make certain we leave nothing to chance and end an era of profoundly un-American, divisive, bigoted politics that have threatened to diminish each and every one of us, and our Union.