EJ Dionne:
“There is something a bit strange, there is something a bit unusual about a Republican primary that’s decided by liberal Democrats.”
The words of Chris McDaniel, the tea party candidate vanquished in Mississippi’s runoff on Tuesday by Sen. Thad Cochran and the state’s GOP establishment, were not the most gracious. But they contained an important truth about why Cochran prevailed after finishing second in the first round of voting on June 3.
In winning, Cochran overturned many of the cliches of political analysis: that runoffs draw lower turnouts than the main event; that incumbents who run behind the first time around typically lose second rounds; and that politics today is all about “turning out the base.”
The slamming of candidates elected on black voters goes all the way back to the first President who won with them: Ulysses S. Grant. #mssen
— @EricKleefeld
:
If McDaniel resembles anything, it’s not a libertarian—although he swims in the current of right-wing libertarianism—as much as it’s a Southern reactionary whose appeal is built on resentment of assorted others, which in Mississippi, inevitably includes black Americans. Take these clips from his radio show, circa 2006, where he mocked complaints of racism, railed against hip-hop as a “morally bankrupt” culture that “values prison more than college,” and promised to stop paying taxes if reparations were ever passed: “How you gonna make me pay for something that I had nothing to do with? How you gonna do that to me? I don’t get it.”
Bangor Daily News:
After receiving the endorsement of the nation’s largest LGBT advocacy group, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday indicated for the first time her personal support for same-sex marriage.
“A number of states, including my home state of Maine, have now legalized same-sex marriage, and I agree with that decision,” Collins said in response to a question from the BDN.
CSM:
Utah’s ban on same-sex marriages violates a fundamental right to marry protected by the US Constitution, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
The 2-to-1 decision marks the most important judicial ruling yet among a steady stream of court decisions that in the past year have invalidated state laws banning same-sex marriages or recognition of such marriages performed in other states.
Can we put gay marriage and Chris McDaniel in some kind of context? How about this, from
Michael Beschloss?
Fifty years ago this week, three young civil rights activists — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — vanished in Neshoba County, Miss.
That same week, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the Senate and was on its way to President Lyndon Johnson for his signature. Mississippi had been seething with death threats against young men and women who had come to register African-American voters in what they called “Freedom Summer.” Goodman and Schwerner were white New Yorkers, Chaney a black Mississippian.
Thanks to Johnson’s secret taping system, we can go back to that moment and hear the president and those around him reacting to the terrible news.
“What do you think happened?” L.B.J. asks his assistant legal counsel, Lee White. “Think they got killed?”
White replies: “This morning they had absolutely no trace. As far as they’re concerned, they just disappeared from the face of the earth.”
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