Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama
Newsweek’s other markers on the left’s racist via dolorosa are some of the most popular ones. They get traded in and out as the truth emerges, and then people forget what the truth was, so liberals can trot the discredited ones out again.
In 2002, the New York Times’s Bob Herbert cited four other liberal chestnuts, which, he claimed, proved that the “Republican Party has become a haven for white racist attitudes and anti-black policies.”2
Excluding random name calling (“southern strategy”! “Dixiecrats”!), Herbert’s evidence against the Republicans was:
1. “the Willie Horton campaign ad”
2. “Bob Jones University”
3. “[In] Reagan’s 1980 presidential run…his first major appearance in the general election campaign was in Philadelphia, Miss., which just happened to be the place where three civil rights workers—Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney—were murdered in 1964.”
4. “During that appearance, Mr. Reagan told his audience, ‘I believe in states’ rights.’”
How many times do we have to disprove these tall tales? Let’s go through them in chronological order.
PHILADELPHIA, MISSISSIPPI—1980
Reagan’s Philadelphia speech is classic Democratic princess-and-the-pea campaigning.
Romney is speaking in Chicago—what can I be offended about?
I’m working on it—give me a minute.
Hurry! I’m going on TV in thirty minutes. Where’s my indignation button?
I’ve got it! “How anyone can give a speech on the economy less than three weeks away from the fifty-seventh anniversary of Chicago native Emmett Till’s death! In Chicago, no less!”
During Obama’s 2008 campaign, doleful reminiscences of Reagan’s kickoff speech in Philadelphia reached an all-time election year high. Former president Jimmy Carter nearly brought Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews to tears, saying:
“When [Reagan] made his speech in Philadelphia, I wept, because he expressed the essence of racial discrimination clearly.…And since then, the Deep South has been dominated by the Republican Party, using the race issue as a subtle and sometimes overt mechanism to gain a majority.…And I remember when my opponent in 1980 opened his campaign, Ronald Reagan, it was in the little town in Mississippi where the three civil rights workers were buried in a dam.”3
Also, in 2008, Irv Randolph wrote in the Philadelphia Tribune that Republicans “have a well documented history of injecting race in presidential campaigns” and then gave as his case-in-chief (besides the GOP’s alluring “southern strategy”): “In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan called for states’ rights in a speech in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier.”4
Roger Simon wrote in Politico.com of Republicans’ history of exploiting racial fears: “Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign in 1980 by giving a speech at a county fair in Philadelphia, Miss, where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—had been murdered in 1964.”5 (Wait until he finds out about Reagan introducing AIDS into the black community! Or was that Bush?)
On MSNBC’s The Ed Show in 2010, Bob Shrum, author of the lying, racism-accusing ad in the Maryland gubernatorial campaign, said, “You know, Ed, [opposing Obama] is perfectly appropriate for a Republican party, a modern Republican party, that’s driven out all the moderates and was born in the southern strategy. We all know what the southern strategy was about. Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for president in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where those civil rights workers were killed.”6
As is evident, Reagan’s Philadelphia speech is a liberal folktale classic.
First, and least important, the speech wasn’t Reagan’s first major campaign speech. It was one of several summer events more than a month before the traditional Labor Day kickoff speech. That’s why the Washington Post headlined a September 1, 1980, article, “Candidates’ Labor Day Speeches Mark Start of Presidential Race,” stating: “The official campaign for America’s 48th presidential election begins today, with President Carter in his native South and Ronald Reagan wooing Democratic voters in the industrial East.”7
Reagan’s opening day campaign speeches were given in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan.
Second, Reagan’s earlier, summertime, speech wasn’t in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three CORE workers were killed. It was at the Neshoba County fairgrounds, seven miles away. There happens to be a major state fair there every year. Contrary to what you may have thought, the state fair has nothing to do with the three CORE workers being killed several miles away in 1964.
But if we’re blaming politicians for hideous crimes that happened within several miles of the towns where they give speeches:
Obama kicked off his 2008 presidential campaign in Springfield, Illinois, where, just a few years earlier, Mark Winger had beaten his wife to death with a hammer and murdered a van driver after framing him for the crime.
Obama gave a major speech during the 2008 primaries to seventeen thousand people at the Reunion Arena in Dallas—the very town where John F. Kennedy was shot!
Obama, the most pro-abortion president we’ve ever had, gave his 2008 convention speech in Denver, not far from where JonBenét Ramsey was murdered and a mass murder of schoolchildren in Columbine occurred.
If liberals truly believed there was something uniquely horrible about the Neshoba County Fairgrounds, why did Michael Dukakis give a campaign speech there during his 1988 presidential campaign?8
Third, now that liberals have told us the symbolic value of where the opening day speech is given, guess where Jimmy Carter gave his while Reagan was in Liberty Park and Detroit?
Carter actually did kick off his campaign in Tuscumbia, Alabama—home to the national headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.9 Yes, that would be the same Jimmy Carter weeping over Reagan’s “Philadelphia speech” on MSNBC in 2008. Carter kicked off his campaign in the town where the KKK was based. Then—not sixteen years earlier.
Reagan even made a crack about Carter’s choice of opening day venues, telling a man wearing a Carter mask in Detroit that he was supposed to be in Alabama “in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan.”10 The KKK responded by denouncing Reagan for using his jab at Carter to try and curry favor with black voters.11
The remaining exhibit of Reagan’s racism for a speech (which was not his opening speech) at the Neshoba County Fair (which was not the site of the civil rights workers’ murders) was that Reagan mentioned…“states’ rights.” Obama’s official position on gun rights during the 2008 campaign was to say he supported states’ rights, and his reelection suck-up to gays on gay marriage is to say it’s a states’ rights issue. I guess “states’ rights” is no longer considered secret code for racism.
WILLIE HORTON—1988
The nadir of dirty campaigning is supposed to be the Willie Horton ad run by George H. W. Bush in 1988 against Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Willie Horton appears in textbooks only as an example of how race is used in an ugly way in American politics.
Evidently, most people do not remember the ad because liberals invoke it as if we all agree that it was obviously racist, and Republicans’ only response is to say, “Al Gore used Willie Horton first!”
The truth is: It was the greatest, fairest, most legitimate ad ever used in politics. Learn your history, Republicans.
The campaign ad described actual Dukakis policies that had effects on real people, clearly illustrating why Dukakis was the kind of left-wing loon who should never be let anywhere near the White House. It was so devastating that all liberals could do was to cry “racism.”
As governor, Michael Dukakis signed a bill eliminating the death penalty. Then, the wacky Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court—the same court that discovered a right to gay marriage in a document written in 1779 by John Adams, and that kept a manifestly innocent man, Geral
d Amirault, in prison for eighteen years—ruled that prison furloughs had to be extended to first-degree murderers, who were never supposed to be released under any circumstances.
The whole idea of prison furloughs is to acclimate prisoners to life on the outside before their release back into the community. It’s for check-kiters, drug dealers, extortionists and other convicts serving a term of years—not first-degree murderers like Horton, who were never going to be reintroduced into the community. First, liberals tell you life in prison without possibility of parole is just as good as capital punishment, then they start giving weekends off to lifers. Even the overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts legislature realized the court’s ruling was insane, and quickly passed a law prohibiting first-degree murderers from being furloughed.
With great fanfare and the enthusiastic support of the ACLU, Dukakis vetoed the bill. It was this precise veto, showily executed by Dukakis, that allowed a savage murderer, Willie Horton, to be released from prison.
The crime that had put Horton in prison was loathsome: He had robbed a gas station of about three hundred dollars and, after getting the money, stabbed the teenaged station attendant, Joseph Fournier, nineteen times then stuffed his body into a garbage can, where he was found by a friend. This was Horton’s second stint in prison, having earlier served time in South Carolina for attempted murder.
But under a furlough policy that existed solely because of Michael Dukakis, Horton was released from prison.
While out of prison on his Dukakis-enabled furlough in 1987, Horton broke into a Maryland couple’s home, beat the man, Cliff Barnes; bound, blindfolded and gagged him; stabbed him twenty-two times; and then spent the next several hours raping and slashing Barnes’s fiancée, Angela Miller. Barnes listened to it all helplessly from the basement. Miller didn’t know if Cliff was dead or alive. Early the next morning, as Horton was raping Miller again, Barnes managed to escape and call the police—twelve hours after he had first encountered Horton in his home. Realizing Barnes had escaped, Horton fled in the couple’s Camaro and was captured after a shootout with the police.12
The Maryland judge who sentenced Horton—to two life terms—refused to return him to Massachusetts, saying he didn’t want to take the chance that Horton would ever be released again. Which was too bad, because Horton had dinner plans with Dukakis during the following month’s weekend furlough.
Everyone knew it was crazy to be springing first-degree murderers. Everyone except the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the ACLU…and the doctrinaire liberal nut the Democrats were running for president.
After their ordeal, Barnes and Miller flew to Boston to request a meeting with Dukakis. All they wanted was an apology and an explanation. But even after a convicted murderer had used his Dukakis-granted furlough to commit a barbarous crime, the governor refused to admit that furloughing remorseless murderers was a mistake. Dukakis hid from the couple and issued a statement reaffirming his strong support for furloughing first-degree murderers.
The Bush campaign thought voters should know about this. In one of the proudest moments in Republican election history, the campaign produced an ad describing the Dukakis furlough program—the perfect emblem of liberal idiocy on crime.
The furlough ad destroyed Dukakis. It exposed him as the kind of reflexive left-wing zealot who would do something stupid and get us all killed. Dukakis was one of the most ridiculous characters ever presented to the American people as a presidential candidate, and because of the Willie Horton ad, the voters knew it.
There was nothing the Democrats could do. As one Dukakis aide said to a reporter: “OK, you write our response to Willie Horton. You write the catchy phrase. You come up with the 30-second spot. You come up with the jingle. What are we supposed to say? That Horton wasn’t let out of prison and that he didn’t rape that woman? What the hell are we supposed to say?”13
First, Democrats tried lying. They falsely claimed prison furloughs were a Republican policy. It would be like saying prisons are a Republican policy. The issue wasn’t furloughs—and it wasn’t prisons—it was prison furloughs for first-degree murderers. No other state in the union had furloughs for prisoners sentenced to life without parole. That was Dukakis’s innovation.
With no place to go, no stinging comebacks, no answers at all, liberals went to their old reliable charge: racism. For those of you who have ever been to our planet, it will not come as a surprise to learn that Horton was black.
But you wouldn’t know that from the Bush ad, which went to heroic lengths to hide Horton’s race. It certainly did not show a picture of Horton. Rather, in accordance with the stultifying politically correct codes of our day, the Bush campaign did everything possible to hide Horton’s race, to the point of showing a “revolving prison door” with all-white criminals passing through it. It was like an Aaron Sorkin production.
Horton’s photo did appear in a thirty-second commercial produced by a private group, but the scariest photo in that ad was the one of Dukakis. This ad was seen by about seven people: It ran only on cable and this was back in 1988, when public-access channels had larger audiences. The private group’s commercial described Dukakis’s furlough policy and Horton’s crimes. Only a liberal would imagine that Angela Miller and Cliff Barnes wouldn’t have minded being raped and tortured for twelve hours—if only Horton had been white!
And yet the Bush campaign commercial on Horton has gone down in liberal history as the most beastly, monstrous act of racist demagoguery in campaign history. As Peter Brimelow says: “A ‘racist’ is a conservative winning an argument with a liberal.” A Louis Harris poll taken in October 1988 showed that Dukakis’s furlough policy had influenced voters more than any other issue in the campaign.14
It was the greatest ad in political history, a one-sentence explanation of why people like Michael Dukakis should never be allowed to run any part of government. I’ll stop writing about the Horton ad when liberals stop lying about it and conservatives stop apologizing for it.
BUSH’S RESTRICTIVE COVENANT—1988
There was more race mongering against Bush for the Willie Horton ad than any racism in either of the Horton commercials. Five days before the election, the Washington Post ran a breathless article about a “whites only” restrictive covenant on a parcel of land owned by Vice President Bush.
Restrictive covenants have been unenforceable in this country since 1948, when the Supreme Court held them unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer. The language of such covenants still appears on deeds, principally because, as a legal matter, no one knows how to get them removed. But any restrictive covenant is a dead letter, utterly meaningless. It would be like trying to enforce a contract for murder.
And yet days before the election, a column in the Post said that Bush’s deed “was not only dirty, it was illegal.” Needless to say, Bush quickly denied even knowing about the null and void covenant and denounced such restrictions as “repugnant.” But the crackerjack Post reporter droned on and on: “It is not ‘irrelevant.’ It is not legal. It is not smart. It is not cute.”15 If liberals spent less time looking for apocryphal constitutional provisions about abortion and ObamaCare, they might notice that there is an an actual Equal Protection Clause and accompanying case law.
BOB JONES—2000
The imbroglio over George W. Bush speaking at Bob Jones University was about that school’s policy against interracial dating. That may have been silly. It may have been theologically incorrect. But it wasn’t racist. Whites couldn’t date people of other races every bit as much as blacks couldn’t date people of other races.
In fact, the policy had nothing to do with blacks at all. The issue arose when an Asian family threatened to sue the school back in the 1950s when their son met and almost married a white girl at the school. So the school banned interracial dating.16
Nonetheless, the school’s dating policy had been a liberal fixation for decades.17 Missing in action when there was real racism to fight, Democrats kicked into high gear fo
r fake racism. Merely for speaking to these peaceful Christians in 2000, Bush was ritualistically censured and made to apologize. Which he did. A few months later BJU dropped its nonracist, utterly irrelevant policy banning interracial dating.
Yet that’s cited as proof of Republican “racism.”
BATTLE FLAG—2000
Like clockwork, every election year the Confederate flag becomes a major campaign issue. This always thrills the Democrats because it finally gives them an issue to run on: their new-found support for the Union side in the Civil War. Which Democrats opposed during the actual war.
Democrats love talking about the Confederate flag because they relish nothing more than being morally indignant. They can’t take the moral high ground on abortion, adultery, illegitimacy, the divorce rate, drugs, crime, a president molesting an intern and then lying to federal investigators—or anything else of any practical consequence. Democrats stake out a clear moral position only on the issue of slavery. Of course, when it mattered, they were on the wrong side of that, too.
Bush’s big moment of racism was to say, during the 2000 Republican primaries, that the people of South Carolina could decide for themselves what to do about the battle flag. In 2008, when Howard Dean said he wanted to “be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” no one had asked him—he just said it.
Bush hadn’t said anything about the Confederate flag, but NBC’s Brian Williams demanded that he take a position—coincidentally, just before the South Carolina primary.
WILLIAMS: Governor Bush, a few blocks from here, on top of the state capitol building, the Confederate flag flies with the state flag and the U.S. flag. [Crowd boos.] It is, as you can hear from the reaction of tonight’s crowd of 3,000 people from South Carolina, a hot-button issue here. The question is: Does the flag offend you personally?