The New York Times’ Bob Herbert is unimpressed with Republican Party Chair Ken Mehlman’s address to the NAACP. Writing of the event, Herbert characterizes it thus:
One of President Bush’s surrogates went before the N.A.A.C.P. last week and apologized for the Republican Party’s reprehensible, decades-long Southern strategy.
The surrogate, Ken Mehlman, is chairman of the Republican National Committee. Perhaps he meant well. But his words were worse than meaningless. They were insulting. The G.O.P.’s Southern strategy, racist at its core, still lives.
Of course, how it still lives is presented quite tendentiously, with Herbert simply asserting, based on a number of disparate instances he attempts to tether into a larger, sweeping, conspiratorial narrative, that the Republican’s southern strategy is “a cynical and remarkably successful divide-and-conquer strategy that nurtures the bigotry of whites and is utterly contemptuous of blacks”—a charge that makes racist accomplices of all southern Republican supporters. Which, not bad for a day’s work, I guess.
Neither Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) nor his Kleagle hood could be reached for comment.
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(h/t John Cole, who has a more detailed analysis of Herbert’s noxious screed. See also, Kevin Drum. For my part, I addressed this pathetic trope at length here, including a heated debate with Hesiod in the comments).
RACIST!
Why even bother with Bob Herbert?
Because he still has prime real estate at the Times, and because he provides people looking for an “authentic” voice to comment on the address to a Black organization ammunition to continue phony and divisive racialist attacks on Republicans?
Seems reasonable.
As a life-long resident of the Magnolia State (apart from a brief spell living in the U.K. in the early Nineties), I can testify that Herbert’s comments on Reagan speaking at the Neshoba County Fair are indeed off base, as Kevin Drum points out in the linked material. The Neshoba County Fair is, partly by tradition, partly by media acclamation, the premier political venue in Mississippi, and it’s rather unfair to cast aspersions on a candidate for speaking there. As far as the “states’ rights” reference, I can only say anecdotally that neither I nor anyone I knew interpreted that as a coded or sinister veiled allusion to anything other than Reagan’s view of federalism.
So far as the larger question of the “Southern Strategy” goes, I’ve always found it a rather insulting notion, rooted in part in the notion that all of America’s ignorance, prejudice and bigotry is concentrated below the Mason-Dixon line, with every single one of us down here salivating for some demagogue to pander to our baser instincts. I would suggest it might be a wee bit more complex than Mr. Herbert would like to admit – or believe.
hood: !,?
“I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.”
— President Lyndon Baines Johnson, speaking to two governors about his true motivations regarding his support of civil rights legislation, while aboard Air Force One.
Fred, I need you source on that one. Good god I could use that in arguements!
What the hell is the point? Man, the Republicans just love to reinforce their stereotypes, especially when it comes to race.
Democrats don’t apologize for nuttin’ and if they ever do it’s always half-assed and bogus (i.e. Durbin).
Props to RS, I have lived all over the country, settled in the south. The idea that the south is more bigoted than anywhere else is ridiculous. It is not the sixties. In fact Boston was about as bad as anywhere I have been.
The point Herbert is missing is the NAACP doesn’t speak for blacks anymore, it speaks for the democratic party. If the republicans truly want to reach the black vote, the NAACP is not the place to go.