Picture this: It is a hot August 11th, 2006, and after successful stints as a Congressman, Governor, and Senator, your whole political life lies ahead of you. You exit your gleaming campaign bus dressed assiduously casual in jeans and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the rest of your retinue wearing the dark power suit/bright power tie combination popular with Important D.C. Advisors and Secret Service agents (you have plenty of the former; the latter will come, you are sure, in just a little over 24 months). You walk and shake hands and pose for pictures and spit streams of Red Man into a Dixie cup (a Dixie cup!) with that rare ease of a Republican palatable to the Look-at-the-Cultural-Abominations-in-my-Father’s-Country crowd while simultaneously held trustworthy by the Pharisee moneylenders in temple Wall Street. You offer platitudes and homilies and—most importantly—the vague but unflaggingly sunny optimism of the man you have perfected the practice of political necrophilia upon, Ronald Reagan, dry-humping the talismanic crucifix of St. Ronnie the Liberal Slayer like a repressed Catholic schoolgirl in order to bring your adoring crowds to climax. (Look Wherlene, his cheeks are even blushed red just like Reagan’s!)
You climb up to the dais in some backwater Virginia hickhole—annoyed, perhaps, that the Bushies have fucked up the country so badly that even your Senate race has tightened to a degree unimaginable just a few short months ago, prompting you to travel to Gawd only knows how many Virginia hickholes to pump every Cletus and Billy Ray and Robert E., Jr. for votes and Confederate dollars. Your Senate seat! The fluffer to your true calling two years hence!
Maybe that is why you are tired, why during your umpteenth stump speech you—George Allen, Junior Senator from Virginia, likely 2008 Presidential candidate—point to your opponent’s annoying but inconsequential Minicam-wielding tracker, call him a monkey in a language no one had even heard of before, and by revealing your own racism belly flop into the Professional Suicide by Racism frat (Brother Jimmy the Greek, Brother Al Campanis, Brother Michael Richards, et al, meet Brother Allen) and quite possibly blow the 2008 elections for the Republicans. To-oh irony, please spare us all- a colored boy!
To be clear, had Allen never uttered that obscure slur, had he found (or not alienated) the 8,806 Commonwealth voters needed to hold his Senate seat, had he beaten a crowded field and wound up as Mr. GOP 2008, had he navigated through all those minefields he still would have faced overwhelming, maybe impossible odds in the general. Eight years of...well, you and the rest of the country know how the last eight years have gone. Perhaps no even Republican could have prevailed under such conditions. Make no mistake, however—Allen intended to run (he had been working Iowa and New Hampshire for at least a year prior to his loss), he stood a better than average chance of winning the nomination, and he almost certainly would have run a stronger campaign than McCain.
It is easy to imagine Allen’s path to the nomination. He is young, not indelibly linked to the Bushies, fairly popular in a swing state, he can claim experience over Obama without appearing to be too much of a D.C. insider, and his conservative credentials are strong yet not embarrassing a la Ms. 23 Hours of Mental Darkness in the Winter Palin. In political math class he is Huckabee plus (Romney minus Mormonism) times the inverse of Fred Thompson’s charisma divided by the sixteen people who voted for Rudy Giuliani. Had the answer to that equation come out in his favor, Allen assuredly would have fared better than McCain in the general—he could hardly have done worse. Probably not enough to win, true, but give him Virginia, a few thousand votes in each of neighboring North Carolina and razor-close Indiana...give him that and a much better relationship with the RNC power structure and Allen can at least draw up a legitimate victory strategy, something McCain could never do.
Consider how much of a drag exit polls showed Palin to be on McCain, and know Allen wouldn’t have picked her (he wouldn’t have needed to) over a serious female VP—Snow, Collins, and Hutchinson all come to mind, three moderate-to-not completely batshit insane Senators who might really have peeled off disgruntled Hillary supporters—or at least kept the borderliners from defecting to Obama for fear that Mayor Mooseport might one day be entrusted with anything in the White House more important than a commemorative frisbee. Again, Allen would have faced an uphill battle even with all the breaks going his way, but if nothing else he might have held Obama to under 300 EVs, making change that much harder considering Republicans are already somehow framing their ass whupping as validation of a ‘Center-Right Nation.’ Yes, it is bullshit, but a squeaker of an election might have mitigated its smell to a whole lot of people—the least of which being a Democratic leadership not exactly known for spine and intestinal fortitude.
But we will never know. Very clearly George Allen is a racist, with the Confederate flags and the nooses and the deer heads in mailboxes and, of course, the macacas. Unfortunately most racists go through life never having to pay for their sins other than the psychic deformation it causes within. Like the aforementioned Campanis and Jimmy the Greek and Michael Richards, Allen is an exception in that his very substantial ambitions were publicly crushed when a slip of his tongue betrayed his heart.
Allen is an even rarer exception in that his downfall also carried national repercussions, and given that all-too-uncommon nugget of poetic justice braining a party who has baited, exploited, and ignored minorities for more than a generation, when I sat down to write this piece I expected to feel haughty dollop of schadenfruede and glee. Think about it—the racist party lost to a black guy! How galling that must feel! However, as I close out this piece I feel sad. Sad for all the harm people like Allen have caused for so many other people, sad because so many still stand ready to blame Obama’s failures (and he will fail at times—that is guaranteed) on the color of his skin, sad knowing that while we as a country have made great progress in terms of race relations, we still have a long, long was to go.
As a sports fan, I see great parallels in Barack Obama with Jackie Robinson. (Allen, who loves sports analogies, might even catch the gist of this.) Robinson was a stellar baseball player and an even more wonderful human being. He played hard and skillfully but with a quiet grace and dignity that allowed him to overcome—to ascend—the entrenched racism prevalent to baseball in those days. When he struck out or made an error, it wasn’t ‘You suck 42’ but ‘You suck n-----’ and a million other slurs that tried to cleave the man, not the ballplayer. I picture someone very much like George Allen standing up to yell those epithets, looking to the white-shirt and crew cut Ebbets Field crowd for encouragement and support. And more often than not getting it.
But now, like Allen, those people are gone, in the ballpark at least. Obama is about to begin his rookie season, and we can only hope that as the GOP retreats to regroup the party chooses once and forever to expel members who nurse similar predilections. Maybe if they do, by raising the lowest denominator they will not only help themselves but bring about the kind of change the macaca-slingers of the party have stood against for a long, long time.