Clinton, Obama, and Racial Politics

by Paul R. Hollrah

Watching Democrats commit politics is an intriguing pastime. In recent days they’ve engaged in some especially outrageous behavior as the Clinton and Obama campaigns sparred over the issues of race and the Nevada caucuses.

The first shot in the internecine battle was fired when Barack Obama made a primary-night victory speech in New Hampshire… celebrating his second place finish. [The battle continued all the way through Obama's landslide victory in South Carolina where he received 78% of the black vote compared to Hillary's paltry 19%.]

In his [New Hampshire] speech, Obama said, “… in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't (Obama failed to mention that it was white Democrats who were saying those things to minorities in order to keep them from wandering off the Democratic plantation), generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people…

“It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land…”

His reference to the “King who took us to the mountaintop” was a clear reference to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a tribute to Dr. King that no member of the Republican Party… the party that was founded out of opposition to slavery, the party that has always been at the forefront of civil rights for all Americans… would ever object to.

However, it was not a statement that white Democrats could take lying down because it totally ignored what has been the single most significant factor in Democrat political success for the past fifty years: the party’s shameless exploitation of the black vote through the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and promises of bigger and better government handouts.

Within hours, Hillary Clinton rose to the challenge. She said, “I would point to the fact that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964… The power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president who said, ‘We are going to do it,’ and actually got it accomplished.”

Well, almost. The fact of the matter is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was almost identical, word-for-word, to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which was passed into law by a Republican Congress and a Republican president, and which Democrats subsequently had overturned by a Democrat-dominated Supreme Court. It is also a fact that the 1964 Act became law only because of the strong support of congressional Republicans. The bill was supported by 80% of House Republicans (138-34) and only 61% of House Democrats (152-96), and by 82% of Senate Republicans (27-6) and 69% of Senate Democrats (46-21).

Yes, Lyndon Johnson supported passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but only because he was forced to do so by Supreme Court rulings and by pressure from the increasingly militant civil rights movement. But how did he really feel about equal rights for African Americans?

As columnist Bruce Bartlett tells us in his forthcoming book, “Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past,” then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson said in a 1957 speech, “These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us (Democrats) since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their (Republican) allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again.”

Those were Lyndon Johnson’s thoughts on the subject just three years before moving to the White House as Vice President of the United States.

Finally, on Tuesday evening, January 15, the American people tuned in to NBC, hoping to see a lively debate between Senators Clinton and Obama and former senator John Edwards. What they saw, instead, was a political softball game with Meet The Press host Tim Russert and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams serving up batting practice softballs for the Democrats.

As the candidates engaged in a hastily-arranged love fest, their lawyers were working feverishly, drafting rules requiring all participants in the upcoming Nevada Democratic caucuses to show photo IDs before being allowed to participate in a caucus. These, of course, were the same Democrats who argued passionately before the U.S. Supreme Court just a week earlier that Indiana’s law requiring voters to show photo IDs before voting should be declared unconstitutional.

Who ever said that Democrats didn’t know who they are and what they’re about? If they are so convinced that they can’t trust each other, then how can they expect any of us to trust them? But they are fun to watch.