Posted on 09/22/2004 4:47:09 AM PDT by beaureguard
Zell Miller wants you to believe that he is dispensing a dose of discipline to his beloved Democratic Party — pointing out the foibles and foolishness that have led to its loss of the South. Miller claims he only wants the Democrats to regain their traditional values before it's too late.
Miller is a hypocrite. As a historian, he knows exactly why the Democratic Party is teetering in the South: It's precisely because the Democrats set aside a century and a half of ugly traditions that it has lost so many rural white Southerners. Miller knows better than most; he was once one of those rural white Southerners who embraced those ugly traditions.
Running for Congress in 1964, Miller dismissed the Civil Rights Act as neither "constitutionally acceptable [n]or fundamentally proper as an approach to the solution of racial problems in America." Even back then, he denounced the Democratic presidential nominee, declaring that Lyndon Johnson "is a Southerner who sold his birthright for a mess of dark pottage." From 1968-71, Miller served as executive secretary to Gov. Lester Maddox, who remained an unrepentant segregationist until the day he died.
In most Southern states, including Georgia, the Democratic Party was so racist that it didn't allow black citizens to vote in its primaries. That's why so many members of the black intelligentsia — including men such as longtime Atlanta Daily News publisher C.A. Scott — were Republicans. Indeed, nationwide, many blacks voted for the GOP. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower got nearly 40 percent of the black vote.
Black voters' allegiance to the Democratic Party began to take root in 1960, when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy made a simple gesture: He called Coretta Scott King to offer reassurance after her husband, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was shunted off to Reidsville State Prison following a lunch counter sit-in. That year, 68 percent of black voters went Democratic.
White Southerners' allegiance to the GOP began in much the same way — over civil rights. The ascension of the Republican Party in the South can be traced to Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, which included a states' rights platform that rejected desegregation.
In their landmark book "The Rise of Southern Republicans," political scientists Earl and Merle Black wrote: "With Goldwater's campaign, the [Republican] Party attracted many racist Southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters. . . . Gradually, a new Southern politics emerged in which blacks and liberal to moderate whites anchored the Democratic Party, while many conservatives and some moderate whites formed a growing Republican Party that owed little to Abraham Lincoln but much to Goldwater and even more to Reagan."
The GOP has built a Southern base by accommodating racists. That doesn't mean most Republican politicians are racists themselves. But they don't hesitate to pander to a constituency that is still uncomfortable with the social changes ushered in by the civil rights movement.
Whether it's denouncing fictional welfare queens, saluting the Confederate battle flag or showing up to speak at Bob Jones University, the GOP knows how to race-bait. Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear a lawsuit against affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan in 2003, President Bush held a news conference to announce his opposition to those policies. He didn't hope to influence the case (and didn't). That was just a sop to his reactionary supporters.
The GOP still has a problem: Its potential is limited. As the nation grows browner, more and more voters will be drawn to the all-inclusive ideals espoused by the Democrats. Meanwhile, Miller, who embraced progressive ideals midcareer, seems to be moving back to his narrow-minded roots. An old mossback like that couldn't be happy in the Democratic Party.
There you go, those southern haters just needed a hateful party to join.
Ought to be interesting when McKinney gets reelected. If I remember, Tucker used to slam her pretty regularly, also.
(To give CT a *minor* point in her favor)
Only if one buys into seeing everything through a racial prism.
How is it that a Party and an Administration that has put so many Blacks in positions of power be constantly accused of "race-baiting?"
BTW, did you hear the Media Fund radio ad?
It's one of those turtles that is so old that it has moss growing on its back. A conservative partisan. A geezer.
If you're against preferences based on race, you're a racist. The world is turned upside-down at this paper. I wonder if this female needs instructions on which shoe to put on which foot.
The "blackest" part of this nation is the South. What color are those states on the election map, Cynthia? Oh yeah, RED!
(/sarcasm)
If it's true, how is that seeing something through a racial prism? I would not put it past a politician to sell people down the river for votes. Anyway, she's being very intellectually dishonest. She's hates Zell Miller and all this essay is about her hate for Zell Miller, not about any legitimate issues of politics.
I've not been listening to the radio too much. Media Fund sounds familiar.
thanks... she called Zell Miller that, and I was just wondering what it meant. Now that I know, wonder what term could be applied to Robert Byrd! LOL
Anyone who address every issue as a racial issue gets no points from me. That covers most liberals of any color.
He made the moms sit up and listen to the TRUTH.
Kerry would not protect this country.
Reminds me of another Cynthia that we have in Georgia.....
If she wants to go back to 1964 to try to trash Miller's reputation I wonder why his reputation was good enough to be the key note speaker in 1992 for Clinton's convention but it's not alright now?
Oh yes I forgot about that. Good point! Probably angry that Bush got a nice bump from that speech.
I don't think she's ever examined her own political beliefs, or herself for that matter. Perhaps if she challenged herself on what she really does believe she'd be incredibly enlightened.
Which "southern strategy" are you referring to? Please elucidate.
The only "southern strategy" that I'm really familiar with is the one where the racist Democrats moved the blacks out of the South and concentrated them on the big city plantations, making them easier to control with drugs, crappy education and long prison sentences, in return for which the Demmies would pay them a few Hamiltons come vote time, and 102% of the "registered voters" would eagerly do their civic duty (Bring out yer dead! See Philadelphia, 2000).
"Mossback" has the connotation of a boulder - a stone set to stand in changing tides. Too bad today's Democratic Party changes so often in its attempt to curry favor among select racists like Jackson Sharpton Company then claim they're representative of mainstream America, it makes Kerry look partly stable.
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