Calculated 'Mistakes': Reagan as Racist

David Brooks has his undies in a bunch. Noted economic radical (and probably communist!) Paul Krugman is calling Ronald Reagan a racist! How dare he?

... still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

Below the fold, why Brooks is full of it.

We all know that in Conservative Land Ronald Reagan was a great president, a paragon of morality and American values, and just this side of the second coming of Christ.

Unfortunately, he also played whatever race baiting cards he needed to ensure a Republican majority and his Presidential victory.

Krugman does a nice job of revisiting reality in his post this week. The upshot, Reagan was an opportunistic politician who used any card he could to get elected. Oh, either that or, he was actually a true, died in wool, racist. Take your pick:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that "I believe in states’ rights," he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Ditto for his quip about the welfare queen, right?

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

Or when he decided to reference the archetypal "strapping young buck"...Remember that?

When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the "strapping young buck" using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as the New York Times reported,
The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression "young buck," which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.

Another innocent mistake. So, too, that 1980 quip about the humiliation caused the good ole boys in the South due to that nasy old Voting Rights Act, right?

Or when he fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission. All, as Krugman notes, just "innocent mistakes"...Right?

Riiiiight.

Methinks David Brook would have better luck defending Pinochet against charges of war crimes and murder. But it's not just Ronald Reagan, it's a Republican strategy, as has often been noted. Here's Bob Herbert on what an insult the Republican are when they do this crap:

The G.O.P. has spent the last 40 years insulting, disenfranchising and otherwise stomping on the interests of black Americans. Last week, the residents of Washington, D.C., with its majority black population, came remarkably close to realizing a goal they have sought for decades — a voting member of Congress to represent them.

A majority in Congress favored the move, and the House had already approved it. But the Republican minority in the Senate — with the enthusiastic support of President Bush — rose up on Tuesday and said: "No way, baby."

At least 57 senators favored the bill, a solid majority. But the Republicans prevented a key motion on the measure from receiving the 60 votes necessary to move it forward in the Senate. The bill died.

At the same time that the Republicans were killing Congressional representation for D.C. residents, the major G.O.P. candidates for president were offering a collective slap in the face to black voters nationally by refusing to participate in a long-scheduled, nationally televised debate focusing on issues important to minorities.

Everyone remember those empty lecterns and soundless microphones?

Good.

This Republican strategy really amounts to three words: fuck non-white people.

In one of the vilest moves in modern presidential politics, Ronald Reagan, the ultimate hero of this latter-day Republican Party, went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 in that very same Philadelphia, Miss. He was not there to send the message that he stood solidly for the values of Andrew Goodman. He was there to assure the bigots that he was with them.

"I believe in states’ rights," said Mr. Reagan. The crowd roared.

Hear that "roaring crowd"?

That's what's missing from Brooks lousy defense of Reagan's racism: the fact that they knew exactly what he was saying but saying in such a way that dissemblers and pundits with the intergrity of guttersnipes could come back later and white wash and deny...

Dog whistle racism, anyone?

In 1981, during the first year of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, the late Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ " said Atwater. "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 what about the Republicans improperly throwing black voters off the rolls in Florida in the contested presidential election of 2000? And sending Florida state troopers into the homes of black voters to intimidate them in 2004? Don't we see a little problem there? I sure do.

To suggest that Reagan and Republicans  ARE NOT playing the race card is scurrilous nonsense. Of course they are.

By refusing to admit such simple realities, Brooks is once again proving himself to be an embarassment to the printed word.