Time and Newsweek Use Lott to Smear GOP as Race-Baiters

Though the Democratic Party was the party of segregation since federal troops left the South in the 1870s and Democrats suppressed blacks for the next century, a legacy reenforced a couple of weeks ago when Louisiana maintained its near-130 year refusal to elect a Republican to the U.S. Senate, this week's Time and Newsweek magazines smeared Republicans, and especially conservatives, as the ones exploiting white resentments against blacks.

Clearly, the record of both parties is not clean as operatives and candidates for both at various times have tried to pit one race against the other, but the magazines used the Trent Lott situation to malign only Republicans and conservatives. A headline in Newsweek declared: "Trent Lott and the GOP grew up together in the South. They both have a painful secret."

Both magazines cited the 1988 Willie Horton ad as an example of GOP race-baiting, but neither bothered to point out what would have ruined their impugning of President George H.W. Bush, that the case of Horton, a rapist and murderer paroled by the Dukakis administration in Massachusetts only to attack again, was first raised in the Democratic primary against Michael Dukakis by Al Gore.

The December 23 Time magazine featured a two-page spread headlined, "Race and the G.O.P." The subhead maintained: "When the Democratic Party embrace the civil rights movement, many alienated Southerners turned to the Republicans. The effects are still being felt today."

The first item on the timeline: Democrat Strom Thurmond becoming the Dixiecrat candidate in 1948, but Time failed to point out how Southern Democratic whites hardly fled to the Republican Party. Thurmond didn't become a Republican until 1964 and whites kept Democrats in control in the South well into the 1980s -- another 40 years -- as segregationist Democrats kept getting re- elected cycle after cycle in beating Republicans.

For 1980 the timeline had: "Ronald Reagan opens his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., and creates a furor when he uses the code words states' rights to appeal to white conservatives."

Of course, it could have just been that he wanted to launch his campaign in the heart of his opponents region to show how much he wanted the votes of Southerners. And with blacks voting in block for the Democrat, what's wrong with trying to rally voters who by then thought they didn't need federal intervention into their lives when electoral wrongdoing in the north did not bring such intervention.

For 1988, under photo of Lee Atwater playing guitar with George H.W. Bush: "Lee Atwater, above, runs George Bush's presidential campaign. An infamous ad attacked Democratic contender Michael Dukakis for granting a furlough to murderer Willie Horton. While the campaign and Atwater denied responsibility for the ad, they reaped its benefits."

As if Dukakis would have won if not for the little-seen ad which continues to obsess the media.

For 1995: "Talking tough on welfare and racial quotas, Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich leads a Republican sweep of Congress in midterm elections, delivering a rebuke to President Bill Clinton."

Quite a smear on at least two fronts. First, it assumes advocating self-worth and responsibility is somehow anti-black and that calling for an end to preferences by race is somehow racist. Second, it ignores how Gingrich got into office in the first place so he'd be around in 1994 to supposedly exploit race: He had to run twice against an incumbent segregationist Democratic Congressman and after nearly beating him in 1976 the incumbent, Jack Flynt, retired in 1978.

The timeline is a graphic you can access from the cover story: http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101021223/story.html

Over in Newsweek, Jon Meacham and Eleanor Clift contended: "Lott's effusive birthday remark has cast a stark light on the grimy engine room of the post-World War II GOP and inadvertently drawn attention to his own history, one marked by nods to a neo-South of Confederate and 'separate but equal' sentimentalists." At least Newsweek did acknowledge that Democrats were "long the main bulwark of segregation in the South."

An excerpt from the December 23 cover story by Meacham with Clift, Julia Reed, Howard Fineman and Arian Campo-Flores:

....The power of Southern Republicanism is a political reality that Bush and his guru Karl Rove understand very well. The painful legacy on which it is built, however, is something they would just as soon we all forget. Lott's effusive birthday remark has cast a stark light on the grimy engine room of the post-World War II GOP and inadvertently drawn attention to his own history, one marked by nods to a neo-South of Confederate and "separate but equal" sentimentalists....

Race was not the only element in the Republican resurgence in the late 1960s. The Democrats -- long the main bulwark of segregation in the South -- were in the midst of running off the left side of the road with a cultural liberalism that alienated many Americans. The war in Vietnam remained more popular in the old Confederacy than in other regions, and many Southerners had respectable and legitimate grievances against big government that had absolutely nothing to do with civil rights. But race was there in the beginning, and lingers still. When Nixon talked about "law and order," it was not hard to figure out what he meant; Thurmond had tested similar themes two decades before. If Truman's civil-rights program was to be enforced, Thurmond said at a campaign stop in Cherryville, N.C., "the results of civil strife may be horrible beyond imagination. Lawlessness will be rampant. Chaos will prevail. And there will be the greatest breakdown of law enforcement in the history of the nation."...

Don't forget, as Newsweek did, that it was Richard Nixon's Justice Department which, along with federal judges, came up with the forced school busing in many cities. That liberal policy prescription only exacerbated white anger at blacks in such northern cities as Boston, an example of where liberal policies did exactly what Newsweek only blames conservatives for doing.

....On racial issues, though, there was a rightward pattern of votes and statements that unfolded in plain sight but did not attract much attention until now. Lott talked last week about his work on jobs and infrastructure and trade with Africa, but he voted against extending the Voting Rights Act; against the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday; against tracking racial hate crimes. And he twice—not once but twice—averred that Strom Thurmond's America would have been preferable to Harry Truman's, or, presumably, Dwight Eisenhower's or John Kennedy's.

Of course, Lott was not the only modern Republican to play the race card. In 1980 Reagan talked about states' rights in Philadelphia, Miss., and his well-worn anecdote about a Chicago "welfare queen" was not a particularly subtle allusion to African-Americans. In 1988 a group sympathetic to George Bush's presidential campaign produced the "Willie Horton ad" attacking Michael Dukakis's furlough program. And when George W. Bush was on the run from John McCain in the early 2000 presidential race, he went to the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina to shore up his base....

OTOH

CNN: Do you have a comment on Senator Lott?

Clinton: No, other than....I think that -- obviously -- I don't agree with him.

But I think there is something a bit hypocritical about the way Republicans are jumping all over him. I think what they really are upset about is he made public their strategy.

The whole Republican apparatus supported campaigns in Georgia and South Carolina on the Confederate flag. There is no action coming out of the Justice Department against all those people, Republicans, who suppressed black voters in the South, in Arkansas and Louisiana, and lots of other places. Telephone operations telling people in Florida they didn't have to vote on Election Day, that they could vote on Saturday but not if they had parking tickets. I mean, this is their policy.

So I think the way that the Republicans treated Senator Lott is a pretty hypocritical since right now, their policy is in my view inimical to everything this country stands for. They tried to suppress black voting, they ran on the Conferederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina and from top to bottom Republicans supported them. So I don't see what they're jumping on Trent Lott about.

I think the Democrats can say we disagree with what he said and we don't think its right but that's the Republican policy. How do you think they got a majority in the South anyway?

CNN: So he should step down as majority leader?

Clinton: I think that's up to them. But I think that they can't say it with a straight face. How can they jump all over him when they're out there repressing and trying to run black voters away from polls and to run on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina. Look at their whole record. The others, how can they attack him? He just embarrassed them by saying in Washington what

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