A certain type of nasty race-baiting is becoming more and more pervasive at the national level. Up until a few years ago, it was more common to exploit anti-black or anti-minority resentment, and though some politicians still do so, we’re seeing a trend toward both sides suggesting that the other is racist or pro-discrimination instead. For example, when Democrats opposed judges nominated by President Bush, Republicans have accused them, as the Washington Post put it, of being “anti-Catholic, anti-South and anti-Hispanic” for opposing judges with those backgrounds.
Here are two recent examples of this. First, Colbert King, writing in the Washington Post, suggested that Senator Barbara Boxer’s harsh questioning of Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearing was motivated by racial stereotypes:
What’s the motive behind this kind of assault? Is it a desire to demean or put her down? Is it a wish to marginalize Rice in the public eye, to suggest that by reason of her intelligence, ability or integrity, she is unqualified to hold her present post or to become secretary of state?
A senator who believes the Bush administration lied about the war, made a mess of postwar reconstruction and ruined relations with long-standing allies would be justified in holding Rice accountable, and in my view, in voting against her confirmation. Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Boxer and John Kerry did as much.
But slurring her as a hollow-headed marionette controlled by Bush? What’s that all about? It calls to mind John Sylvester, a white radio talk show host in Madison, Wis., who recently went Boxer and Oliphant one better — or worse. “Sly,” as he calls himself, went on the air and caricatured Rice as a servile black, laboring slavishly for the Bush White House. He called her, of all things, an “Aunt Jemima.”
The Boxer-Oliphant-Sylvester take on Condoleezza Rice stands in sharp contrast to the assessment offered by Dorothy Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, who wrote in a letter to The Post this week: “Despite the challenges she will face, Ms. Rice’s appointment is a time for women of color to smile.”
Unfortunately, King’s comments are part of a long pattern of similar accusations, as the liberal group Media Matters documents.
Now the GOP is trying to link Democrats to pro-slavery members of the party from 150 years ago:
Condoleezza Rice took the oath Friday as the first black woman to be secretary of State, then immediately reached back into history to invoke the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
Her words were the latest example of President Bush and his top aides citing the Republican Party’s often-forgotten 19th century antislavery roots — a strategy that GOP leaders believe will help them make inroads among black voters in the 21st century.
And if it reminds voters that the Democrats once embraced slavery, that’s not such a bad byproduct, strategists say.
Bush, who keeps a bust of Lincoln prominently displayed in the Oval Office, is making Civil War references a staple of his speeches promoting democracy overseas and policy changes at home. And a glossy, GOP-produced “2005 Republican Freedom Calendar,” spotlighting key moments in the party’s civil rights history, has been distributed to party officials nationwide.
“We started our party with the express intent of protecting the American people from the Democrats’ pro-slavery policies that expressly made people inferior to the state,” Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) wrote in a letter printed on the calendar.
The letter continued: “Today, the animating spirit of the Republican Party is exactly the same as it was then: free people, free minds, free markets, free expression, and unlimited individual opportunity.”
Note how Cox implicitly equates Democratic support for slavery before the Civil War with their support for more government intervention in the economy today (both of which make “people inferior to the state”). This is ugly stuff.