Posted on 12/29/2002 8:35:58 AM PST by TLBSHOW
The Neocons & Nixon's Southern Strategy
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child.
Lear's reflection upon ingratitude comes to mind as one reads of the squabble among neoconservatives over who among them was first to stick his nail file in the back of Trent Lott.
Charles Krauthammer enters a claim for the Kristol-Bennett crowd, while Jonah Goldberg of National Review and cashiered Bush speech-writer David Frum insist they, too, played supporting roles.
Whether Lott may have been innocent of any hate crime, or whether they might have had a moral duty to step in to stop a lynching of one of their own -- even had Lott blundered -- seem to be thoughts that never once intruded upon these tiny minds. Yet their collusion in ruining Lott, their relish in the pats on the head they are receiving from the Left, confirm the suspicion. Neoconservatives are the useful idiots of the liberal establishment.
With Lott gone, Bill Kristol is now collaborating with The New York Times in its rewrite of the history of the 1960s, a decade of liberal debacles, to credit racism for the Republicans' success.
"Lott is really virtually the last of the products of Richard Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' to be in major positions of power in the Congress," Kristol assures the Times. "With his leaving you will have cleared out people who ... have a somewhat compromised image to the country as a whole."
Now, as a co-architect of the Nixon strategy that gave the GOP a lock on the White House for a quarter century, let me say that Kristol's opportunism is matched only by his ignorance. Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column on the South (by this writer) that declared we would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the "party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice."
In that '66 campaign, Nixon -- who had been thanked personally by Dr. King for his help in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 -- endorsed all Republicans, except members of the John Birch Society.
In 1968, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew for V.P. Why? Agnew had routed George ("You're home is your castle!") Mahoney for governor of Maryland but had also criticized civil-rights leaders who failed to condemn the riots that erupted after the assassination of King. The Agnew of 1968 was both pro-civil rights and pro-law and order.
When the '68 campaign began, Nixon was at 42 percent, Humphrey at 29 percent, Wallace at 22 percent. When it ended, Nixon and Humphrey were tied at 43 percent, with Wallace at 13 percent. The 9 percent of the national vote that had been peeled off from Wallace had gone to Humphrey.
Between 1969 and 1974, Nixon, who believed that blacks had gotten a raw deal in America and wanted to extend a helping hand:
-- raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
-- doubled the budget for black colleges;
-- appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president, including LBJ;
-- adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and universities;
-- invented "Black Capitalism" (the Office of Minority Business Enterprise), raised U.S. purchases from black businesses from $9 million to $153 million, increased small business loans to minorities 1,000 percent, increased U.S. deposits in minority-owned banks 4000 percent;
-- raised the share of Southern schools that were desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent. Wrote the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, "It has only been since 1968 that substantial reduction of racial segregation has taken place in the South."
The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie. Nixon routed the Left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.
Nixon led America out of a dismal decade and was rewarded with a 49-state landslide. By one estimate, he carried 18 percent of the black vote in 1972 and 25 percent in the South. No Republican has since matched that. To see Kristol colluding with the Times to rewrite that history to make liberals heroes and Republicans villains tells us more about him than about the era.
And where were the necons, when Goldwaterites and Nixonites were building the New Majority? Going all the way with LBJ.
With good reason, imo.
The two groups are diametrically opposed on many issues. I welcome these splits.
Sure, and that's why Paul Gottfried is one of the more prominent paleocon writers. But thanks for providing us with such a stellar example of neocon bigotry.
Sadly, you're right.
Thus the whole Bob Dole "My Turn" campaign of '96. Excellebt observation.
As long as we're speaking about Jewish paleocons, I just read a piece by Gottfried that says the author who most influenced him was Murray Rothbard. Rothbard started out as a libertarian, but his views eventually became highly paleocon. And, if I am not mistaken, he too was Jewish.
That's funny Pat. I know you were a minor Nixon player but your 2000 "3rd party" candidacy seemed a hell of a lot more like George Wallace '68 than Richard Nixon '68.
Nixon was from the ol' school "anti-communist" wing of the party that appealed to middle America and was made up of northern conservatives like himself and McCarthy in the 50s. Wallace, on the other hand, was an traditional southern Dixiecrat who pandered to unions and blue-coller workers (in both the north and south) while trying to get social consevative votes. I seem to recall which demographic you were looking for. Unfortunately for you, the ol' southern "Conservative Democrat" was dying off by the time of your candidacy, hence you got 0.4% with your "base".
The Pat Buchanan of 1968 helped elect Nixon, but the Pat Buchanan of 2000 would undoubtly been in George "vote Carter '76" Wallace's corner.
The only way Democrat presidential candidates have won Southern electoral votes is by being Southerners and masking their anti-American proclivities, i.e. Carter & Clinton. In 76, Carter won every single Southern State except VA. In 80, he lost every one but GA. Bubba diluted Bush Sr's Southern electoral strength and the same with Dole. Gore was rightly perceived as a faux Southerner and lost every Southern State, including his "home" state.
Remember Kristol was advising Dan Quayle & Bush Sr. in the 92 election.
Some comments on Nixon specifically. Nixon was more liberal socially and domestically. He picked Harry Blackmum who authored the infamous Roe V. Wade decision. He instituted wage & price controls and did some other things that compromised his conservative credentials. Then again he never had a Republican Congress to work with. Buchanan, I'm pretty sure thinks he had more influence on the GOP Presidents he served than he actually did. To give him credit, I think he came up with the "nittering nabobs of negativism" line for Agnew.
I forgot where I read this once. Essentially Nixon had no reason to think he was going to lose the '72 election to McGovern. If Nixon had disbursed campaign funds down to the congressional election rather than hogging them to acheive an electoral landslide, the Senate might have turned Republican. That would have meant no Sam Ervin.
As far as Lott. My problems with him began almost as soon as he became Majority Leader. He seemed to continuously get outfoxed by Daschle and the impeachment handling etc. convinced me the GOP was ill served by Lott as leader. That was long before the birthday gaffe. The gaffe was all the more perplexing to me because there was so much more Lott could have used to honor about Thurmond's life. His quixotic '48 election bid was not something I would use to commemorate him.
Kristol's support of McCain is all I need to know about Kristol. Everything I hear from him goes through that filter.
The sword of truth is mighty sharp.
These things get more talk-talk than implementation .. not unlike the bones that the other party throws to their salivating constituencies from the political stump. Meantime government grows and grows.
More importantly, foreign adventure dreams grow even more monstrously. We have departed in a relatively short time from Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill to the imposition of "our values" at the point of a bayonet.
WELL!.......there you go again!....
You've left the restrictions of the metaphore...
Lady liberty like all women have one breast larger than the other.... Remember Bush is hampered by a whole congress full of other RINOS... And the 900+ FBI files Hillary has filed in her computers are NO help at all either.. And while we're watching Lady Libertys beasts-->> Hillary and her minions are performing "other operations" on Lady Liberty (while shes bent over) that can't be mentioned here.
DON'T EVEN ASK!...
Exactly. I welcome such a split.
Let them go sell themselves as the party of big government, abortion, social programs, foreign interests, open borders, disdain for the constitution and global markets.
I wonder who will be left after they secure the "NWO" vote?
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