The Shattered Template In Arizona

American Spectator

By Jeffrey Lord on 5.4.10 @ 6:10AM

"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n….s, and they stomped the floor." -- Democrat George Wallace on his first, failed, race for Governor of Alabama

That sound you hear is a rare thing.

A liberal template is being shattered in Arizona. The template of race.

It's an important liberal template too. Central to the success of one of the biggest of liberal myths. The myth? That the electoral successes of the Left throughout American history have had nothing to do with race, much less racism. That in fact all those angelic lefties out there just want truth, justice and the American way for white and black and brown and yellow and red and any other combination of hues on the color scale. Kumbaya. Divide by race? How insulting!

The truth, however -- and that truth is reappearing vividly once again in Arizona -- is that the American Left could not have made it to the 21st century without tying itself tightly to abject racism. It has secured political success in the past by playing every possible race card from supporting, in order, slavery, segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan and racial quotas, while fiercely opposing the legal immigration of Asians. The latter were labeled by Democrats as "a servile race" whose presence was objectionable because "they had not sprung from the great parent stock." Now, in the piece de resistance, the Left is using the race card with illegal immigration. And it is no accident that what began with racial appeals to whites (in opposing rights for blacks and legal immigration for Asians) moved on to racial appeals to blacks and now to brown-skinned Americans. The more the race changes, the more the approach stays the same.

The liberal media, but of course, is complicit. And, it is most import to understand, it has always been so. If liberals were the (literal) slave masters and segregationist bullies of America's past (and they were), the left-leaning press was the plantation PR agent. They approached progressives and their use of race in such a starkly deceptive fashion as to be a pluperfect example of what this magazine's editor in chief R. Emmett Tyrrell calls "the Kultursmog." Tyrrell defines the term (in his new book After the Hangover) as a liberal "pollutant" which "contaminates such vast areas of American culture with Liberal prejudices and bugaboos." There is no need to rehash here the details of all those Democratic Party platforms (26) that directly supported either slavery itself or segregation when they weren't whacking away at Asians. Suffice to say the American Left has danced, tangoed, waltzed, and fox- trotted when not sleeping with every incarnation of racism in America from the beginning to this moment. Somehow, this just never made it into the news of the day as reported by all those Lefty journos, the cultural smokestacks never getting around to pumping this particularly cleansing truth into the political atmosphere.

Case in point (there are an endless number) is the New York Times' handling of the death in 1924 of former President Woodrow Wilson, a hero then and now of the American Left.

The day after Wilson's death, befitting the importance of a powerful president, the Times published a three page review of Wilson's career. Three pages in fine print, beneath the headline Career of Woodrow Wilson as College Executive, Governor and President. There was not a single, solitary word that Wilson was not only a thorough-going racist, had avidly courted like-minded segregationists to get elected (carrying the 13 states of the "Solid South") but had used his presidential power to both segregate the federal government and appoint rabid progressive-racists to powerful posts, such as Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Daniels, on cue, promptly segregated the US Navy.

And of these decidedly important events which vividly illustrated the historic tie between the American Left and racists the Times reported: Nothing. Zero. Not one solitary word in a three-page, fine print career review.

The Times did have space for other headlines though during the so-called "Progressive Era." They are unintentionally revealing of the American Left's view of race.

"Woman Rescued from Negro"
"Woman Stabbed by a Negro"
"Negro Attacks a Teacher"
"Negro Kills a Sheriff"
"Negro Saves $30,000"

Got that? Not "Woman Rescued" or "Woman Stabbed" or "Man Attacks a Teacher" or "Man Saves $30,000." Noooooooooo. It's a Negro. Yet when a white man was caught sending bombs to three people, the headline ran: "Three Bombs His, Janitor Admits." Race never made the story, the man's ethnic surname identifying him as an Irish American. A white man.

This was -- and is -- the way the liberal media deals with race. It is a necessary base line for the success of the American Left. The Times was relentless in reporting blacks as perpetrators of all manner of bad deeds -- because this supported the need for progressive-racists to appeal successfully for white votes. It worked. And when Woodrow Wilson died, the historical record of what he had actually done -- the true nature of the relationship between the left and racism during the Wilson presidency -- vanished. Right in front of the eyes of 1924 Times readers. Then again, how can something vanish if it's never reported in the first place?

As time moved on, a strange similarity began to emerge as the Left finally engaged with American blacks.

Progressives presented big government to blacks in precisely the same way they presented it to white Southerners: tied tightly together to the idea of racial identity. Thus emerged a whole generation of progressive black politicians who were the mirror image of their white supremacist counterparts: each exploiting the combustible mix of racism and big government.

Nowhere has this approach been more prominently displayed then on Capitol Hill, where the Congressional Black Caucus has emerged blessed by the liberal media, with the progressive-racism formula burnished to a finely polished glow.

When liberal white Congressman Steve Cohen, elected from a Tennessee district that is 60% black, requested membership to what he assumed was the politically simpatico Black Caucus, he was refused. In stark terms worthy of a Klan member (underneath those hoods were big government leftists) denying membership to an eager -- but black -- leftist, Black Caucus member Congressman William Lacy Clay, Jr. bluntly delivered the response: "Mr. Cohen asked for admission, and he got his answer. He's white and the Caucus is black. It's time to move on. We have racial policies to pursue and we are pursuing them, as Mr. Cohen has learned. It's an unwritten rule. It's understood."

Yet this starkly racial rejoinder never made the liberal press so much as blink. Why might that be?

The original verbal attack by Southern progressives on supporters of equal rights in the Solid (which is to say Democratic) South was that so-and-so was a "n…lover." The term radiated hatred, as it was designed to do. The message was that race X -- African Americans in this case -- were inferior. And that if you deigned in word or deed to suggest otherwise, you were to be stigmatized by this description.

Today, "racist" is the new "n-word" for the Left.

It is used precisely by white, black, and Latino progressives in exactly the same way the "n-word" phrase was used in the Solid South by white progressives; to stigmatize, to render illegitimate for social -- and most importantly -- political reasons. It is not possible to have a "Solid South" or a "black vote" or "Hispanic vote" turning out for progressive causes en masse unless the race button is pushed.

And so, it's pushed.

The newest crop of those pushing the old progressive-race theme -- this time with Latinos -- include the well-schooled members of the Congressional Black Caucus. This being the group that proudly excludes non-blacks -- that would be Latinos as well as whites -- per Congressman Clay. So a group of Democrats that deliberately discriminates against Latinos and whites in the fine style of their party's tradition is out there using the r-word with all the skill of George Wallace if not the subtlety of Woodrow Wilson or the New York Times.

The "racist" label is quickly affixed to any and all who believe in a color-blind America, just as the "n-word" once was employed in the quest for progressive electoral victories based on appeals to white supremacy. This in turn fills American leftist politics with those who use only a marginally updated version of that George Wallace quote to succeed, simply substituting the "r word" for the "n word." As in:

"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about racists, and they stomped the floor."

They are stomping the floor in Arizona, as seen here.

Not slow to cheer on the floor stompers was President Obama.

"It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African Americans, Latinos, and women, who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again."

And right there, the liberal template on race -- in use for the better part of two centuries -- has now begun to shatter.

Why?

The conservative media exists -- and from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Times to the New York Post to Rush Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio -- the entire progressive-race axis is not only being exposed it is being mocked.

• Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal even brought in some establishment Republicans:

The establishments of the American political parties, and the media, are full of people who think concern about illegal immigration is a mark of racism. If you were Freud you might say, "How odd that's where their minds so quickly go, how strange they're so eager to point an accusing finger. Could they be projecting onto others their own, heavily defended-against inner emotions?"

Good question Peggy. Very good question with a lot of sad history that already gives the rest of us an answer.

• Jeffrey Kuhner in the Washington Times: "Mr. Obama is fracturing America. He is calling on the primacy of race and gender in order to perpetuate his national socialist revolution"

• Rush Limbaugh threw the "r-word" right back at Obama: "This is the regime at its racist best."

• Mark Steyn mocked the "r-word" as only a legal immigrant can:

As I write, I have my papers on me -- and not just because I'm in Arizona. I'm an immigrant, and it is a condition of my admission to this great land that I carry documentary proof of my residency status with me at all times and be prepared to produce it to law enforcement officials, whether on a business trip to Tucson or taking a 20-minute stroll in the woods back at my pad in New Hampshire.

Who would impose such an outrageous Nazi fascist discriminatory law?

Er, well, that would be Franklin Roosevelt.

• Bob Gorrell: The cartoonist featured in The New York Post perhaps scored as only a cartoonist can, with this gem showing a baffled Arizonan saying he only wants the law obeyed and those with proper documentation allowed in his state -- only to be fingered by an angry Democrat as a racist.

The problem for progressives is that in today's world millions of Americans of all colors -- those who really do believe in a color-blind society and live it everyday with family, friends, neighbors, employers, employees, colleagues and so on -- simply refuse to be played. A Rasmussen poll shows that 70% of Arizonans -- not just white Arizonans but all Arizonans be they white, black, brown, red or yellow -- want their border secured. Like people everywhere else in America they have locks on their door for a reason, and cannot fathom the idea that if their house were suddenly invaded by hundreds of uninvited and increasingly violent people of any race they would be deemed "racists" for calling the police.

But the push is on to make Hispanics the new white supremacists, to make the people in that Phoenix rally into the kind of people in this rally. To tie people together politically by the fact of skin color as opposed to the idea of America, of liberty, of freedom and economic opportunity for all.

Make no mistake: the reason progressives use race so desperately to win elections -- and have done so forever -- is that they are desperate. For control. Control over you, your health care, your taxes, your checkbook, your kid's schools, your view of religion -- everything and anything right down to the latest ploy to remove salt from your diet and plastic toys from McDonald's. And they can't get it unless they place the race card.

But time has moved on. It isn't 1924 anymore.

The liberal template on race is shattering. Seventy-percent of Arizonans know the game -- and so does the conservative media.

And we refuse to play.