Pandering to Racists

Now that I’m out of politics I no longer have to worry about offending people’s delicate sensibilities which is handy from a few standpoints the first and foremost of which is that I don’t really care what others think since I’m a sociopathic asshole.

It’s entirely likely I find you a moron. Fifty percent of you are, by definition, of sub-normal intelligence though my audience is somewhat self selecting and biased for brilliant because I write at a 9th grade level (I despise the ‘academese’ that passes for higher- in-jokes and arrogant obscurity).

So I’m not without prejudice or more serious moral failings but compared to the manipulative cynicism of our mercenary masters, the permanent political class, I am a cockeyed optimist (remember that Nellie Forbush is an unredeemed and unrepentant racist who turns down a life of luxury in the South Pacific with a wealthy Plantation owner who is no model of virtue himself because she can’t get over the fact that he likes his sugar… brown).

Yay! She’s a feminist icon because monogamy and virginity are aspirational values of a Victorian, monastic, patriarchic culture and race a genetic mark of Cain proving ‘others’ are inferior because of inherent sluttiness and not rape. Did you know Nellie was from Arkansas? I was raised to be charming, not sincere.

I have my disagreements with Hillary and almost none of them revolve around her ‘toughness’ or competency. I don’t have nearly as many with Trump because I don’t expect anything of him other than to have the morals and emotional depth of a fairly sleezy used car salesman who will tell you the showroom paint job is all original even when you pop out chunks of Bondo and count the layers.

“Hey, it looked just like that when we bought it so it’s all original to me.”

No, it takes a special kind of self deception (as opposed to mere ignorance and stupidity) to betray your faithful believers. Obama has it and practices at almost every opportunity. Hillary has it and when she doesn’t indulge the cognoscenti tut-tut, shake their heads, and call it a gaffe.

Hillary’s Risky ‘Deplorables’ Strategy
By Bill Scher, Politico
September 15, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” moment blew up on the campaign trail last weekend like the major gaffe everyone had been waiting for. Donald Trump had new ammunition for the home stretch — a moment echoing Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment that made clear just how much he disdained a wide swath of America. The attack line was clear: Clinton had just needlessly maligned, even thrown overboard, millions of white working-class voters.

Yet Clinton only half walked it back—and the Clinton campaign overall appears happy to keep talking about Trump’s most loathsome supporters. This might all be a mistake on her part, a blunder followed by a refusal to back down. More likely, in such a thoroughly data-driven operation, it’s a strategy — a calculated gamble that represents a new turn in American politics. By squarely siding with civil rights activists who demand that racism be forcefully confronted, she’s making clear that she views her path to victory doesn’t run through the white working-class vote. Rather, she’s making a bet that the makeup of 21st century America allows her to do something no Democratic nominee, not even Barack Obama, has done before: win the White House without winking at white grievance.

This marks a big shift for the Democrats. You can see how big by traveling back to 1992, contrasting Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” moment with Bill Clinton’s famous “Sister Souljah” moment. With race relations in America a tinderbox, Bill Clinton stood up at Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition conference and tackled the issue of race relations. And what he delivered — in front of a crowd of America’s most influential black leaders — was a blunt appeal to white people.

Bill Clinton took advantage of the fact that he addressed the Rainbow Coalition one day African-America rapper-activist Sister Souljah. She had become a lightning rod for criticism after glib comments about the deadly riots sparked by the Rodney King verdict that, if taken literally, condoned homicide. (“I mean, if black people kill black people everyday, why not have a week and kill white people?” she said.) Clinton condescendingly scolded the room for having invited her. “Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with the kind of hatred that you do not honor today,” he said. After digging up an earlier comment in which she said, “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them,” Clinton shot back, “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”

Now let me stop right there to point out that Trump’s electoral support is barely, by the most optimistic estimates, 50%. Hillary said-

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

Bravo! So that means roughly 75% of all United States voters are “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”

And the other 25% are closet (or not so much) bigots, homophobes, and racists who’ve been carefully taught to hate and kill. Do you have any trouble believing that? Have you been out of your door recently? Look, I’m about 1 point away from clinical agoraphobia and even I get it. In fact I consider it a wild overestimation of the “goodness” of the populace (umm… what about average and sub-normal are we not grasping here?).

To continue-

The loosening of white working-class support dates back to the 1948 Democratic convention, when then-Mayor Hubert Humphrey won a contentious floor vote to include a civil rights plank in the party platform, prompting several “Dixiecrats” to bolt the convention and briefly form a segregationist “States’ Rights Democratic Party.” After President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the tectonic plate of Dixiecrats began to break off for good. South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 States’ Rights presidential candidate, switched from Democrat to Republican. The segregationist Democrat Alabama Gov. George Wallace ran for president in 1968 under the newly created American Independent Party banner, siphoning off working-class white voters from the Democrats, depriving Hubert Humphrey a popular vote majority, and winning five Deep South states for himself.
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During the primary, he (Jimmy Carter) defended communities “who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods,” and while opposing housing discrimination, he insisted that “the government ought not take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood.” After his strongest African-American supporter, Rep. Andrew Young, said he made a “terrible blunder” for using a phrase “loaded … with Hitlerian connotations,” Carter apologized for the phrase “ethnic purity.” But, in a nod to those ethnic working-class whites, he stuck with his policy position.

Then on the Sunday before the general election, in a scene that makes Obama’s troubles with Rev. Jeremiah Wright look tame by comparison, the deacons of the Plains, Georgia, church where Carter worshipped refused to let four African-Americans enter, locking its doors and cancelling services instead. The minister accused the deacons of following a rule that banned “all n***ers and civil rights agitators” from the church. The church clerk, who was Carter’s cousin, not-so-helpfully clarified that the rule in question specified “Negroes.”

The next day, Carter denounced the policy and pledged to work toward ending it. But much like how Obama could not “disown” Rev. Wright or his “white grandmother,” Carter refused to disown his church: “I can’t resign from the human race because there’s discrimination. I can’t resign as an American citizen because there’s still discrimination. And I don’t intend to resign from my own church because there’s discrimination. … Now if it was a country club, I would quit … but this is not my church, it’s God’s church.” Such a response today might have sunk him. But in 1976, Carter successfully walked the line, winning the black vote handily while retrieving those Deep South states that both Wallace and Richard Nixon had swiped from the Democrats.

Because, of course, it’s God himself who cursed those “n***ers” with the Melanin Mark of Cain that destined them within the womb to lifetimes of servitude to their intellectually superior and lighter skinned Masters, just like he cursed a majority to life without a penis (ignore the chromosome damage, you have no idea how evolutionary advantageous it is to be able to pee standing up).

Barack Obama’s 2008 win may have proved Democrats could win without a majority of the white working class, which went for Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin by 18 points. But even the Harvard-educated African-American constitutional law professor didn’t completely give up on them. In 2008, he survived videos of his pastor saying, “God damn America” for past and present racism by pushing back in his famous “More Perfect Union Speech.” He rejected Wright’s critique as “a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic.” He went further, sympathizing with “white resentments” from those who have “worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away.”

A month later, footage from a private campaign event leaked, showing Obama sociologically dissecting those resentful whites: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Then-rival Hillary Clinton, years away from denouncing racists as “deplorables” went on the attack, saying, “Sen. Obama’s remarks are elitist, and they are out of touch.” Recognizing the potential damage, a contrite Obama offered “regret” for his wording. He would eventually perform slightly better with the white working class than 2004 Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry in 2008, though he would fare slightly worse than Kerry in 2012.

How did Obama overcome that weakness? He was able to win with a different coalition than Bill Clinton, less Southern and less working class. In 1992, the Latino share of the electorate was 2 percent; in 2012, it was 10 percent, and Obama won it nearly 3-to-1. The African-American electorate was bigger too, and Obama’s level of support there was nearly unanimous. And he got white support where he needed it. He lost the college-educated white vote to Mitt Romney by only 6 points. And his northern white-working class numbers were better than in the South, buoying him in Ohio, Colorado and Iowa.

The New York Times’ Nate Cohn has argued that white voters mattered more to Obama’s win than is commonly assumed: Based on analysis of census and voter-file data, Obama did better with the white working class than the exit polls indicated, suggesting that Clinton cannot cavalierly abandon them. Trump’s competitiveness in Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada polling bolster the case that his working-class appeal could flip some blue states red.

Clinton is not completely writing off the entire white working class. She turned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. She has gamely proposed an aid package for coal communities, despite her infinitesimal chances in West Virginia. Even in her “Basket of Deplorables” comments, she distinguished between the bigoted and those who “feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”

But what she doesn’t do is rationalize “white resentments,” as Obama did in 2008 and as many Democrats did before him, which certainly cuts off her ability to win votes from whites who carry racial resentments.

Clinton is making a highly risky choice in refusing to extend that hand—if you assume that the white working-class is monolithic on racial issues.
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In the 1960s, playing the race card meant driving a wedge through the Democratic Party and bringing white Democrats under the Republican umbrella. Today’s white Democrats are resistant to the Nixonian “law and order” race-baiting appeals that Trump regularly employs. Such rhetoric works relatively better with those who do not have a college degree than with those who do, but for the most part, those people are the working-class whites who are already Republicans.
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Democrats have been the party of civil rights ever since the 1964 Civil Rights Act scrambled partisan affiliations. Yet no Democrat has won the presidency without, in some fashion, bowing to racial grievances by whites. If Hillary Clinton does so for the first time, it will confirm a new kind of election math can work for the Democrats and forever change how American elections are won and lost.

I suppose you could say I have the luxury of having nothing to lose but I’m angling for this job as a pundit only I’m not sure about the mandatory lobotomy.

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” – she always called me Elwood – “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.

I’ve brought ’em out here to get that stuff, and I’ve drove ’em home after they had it. It changes them… On the way out here, they sit back and enjoy the ride. They talk to me; sometimes we stop and watch the sunsets, and look at the birds flyin’. Sometimes we stop and watch the birds when there ain’t no birds. And look at the sunsets when its raining. We have a swell time. And I always get a big tip. But afterwards, oh oh…

“Afterwards, oh oh”? What do you mean, “afterwards, oh oh”?

They crab, crab, crab. They yell at me. Watch the lights. Watch the brakes, Watch the intersections. They scream at me to hurry. They got no faith in me, or my buggy. Yet, it’s the same cab, the same driver. and we’re going back over the very same road. It’s no fun. And no tips… After this he’ll be a perfectly normal human being. And you know what stinkers they are!

Yeah, it’s one letter away from robotomy. Coincidence. You make that flower look lovely.