The Iowa caucuses will be held on Thursday but I want to get the year started by looking back.
On this day 145 years ago, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. For most African Americans, Lincoln remains the last good Republican.
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to President Reagan, claims to have unearthed the Democratic Party's "buried past":
However, if a single mention of states' rights 27 years ago to is sufficient to damn the Republican Party for racism ever afterwards, what about the 200-year record of prominent Democrats who didn't bother with code words? They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and "Jim Crow" laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century.
Like other Republican apologists, Bartlett refuses to accept that race is the GOP's Achilles' heel. Black self-identification with the Democratic Party is based on which party better represents their interests.
Bartlett is whistling "Dixie" if he thinks dusting off history will change black voters' perception that today's GOP offers little more than the illusion of inclusion.
Besides, black voters harbor no illusions about the Democratic Party.
Black folks left the party of Lincoln because it was not in their interest to align themselves with a political party that had been hijacked by southern Democrats who opposed seminal civil rights legislation.
As my friend Robert A. George, a member of the New York Post editorial board, points out:
For example, Bartlett castigates the Democratic Party for permitting
the return of the Strom Thurmond-led Dixiecrats after they bolted
during the 1948 campaign over Harry Truman's civil rights policy (one
Democrat that Bartlett praises).
Yet, the GOP's welcoming of
Thurmond less than two decades later - and his endorsement of Barry
Goldwater because of the latter's opposition to the Civil Rights Act -
is literally ignored.
Indeed, the entire Goldwater '64 campaign
is summarized thusly: "On Election Day, Johnson did indeed lose much of
the South . . . beating Republican Barry Goldwater, a senator from
Arizona who had opposed the civil rights bill on constitutional
grounds, 61 percent to 39 percent."
Yes, Goldwater's opposition
to the Civil Rights Act was "constitutional," but despite his personal
opposition to discrimination, he adopted a coldly cynical political
strategy: In 1961, he told Georgia voters that it made more sense for
Republicans to go "hunting where the ducks are," i.e. after whites
opposed to the federal government's increasing role in civil rights.
The casual reader might find this more than just a GOP "sin of
omission."
This isn't a minor point. Blacks irretrievably
flipped to the Democratic Party during the 1964 election. In 1960, they
were a "swing" vote that gave Nixon 33 percent of their support. Yet
Goldwater received only 6 percent. This didn't occur by accident.
And it isn't by accident that part of the story is left out of Bartlett's narrative.
