In Boston today:
Boston's Racial Barriers Slow to Fall (washingtonpost.com): Just last month, a white landlord in Belmont, a predominantly white Boston suburb, agreed to pay an aerospace engineer $50,000 for rejecting his rental application after finding out that he was black. Stephen Ruffin had come to Boston with his wife and two children from an Atlanta suburb in 2000 to work as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The landlord allegedly told a real estate agent that the neighbors would be unhappy if she rented to a black family...
In the White House today:
Posted by DeLong at September 16, 2003 05:26 PM | TrackBackRon Suskind on Karl Rove and the 2000 South Carolina primary: ...As for the Waterloo of South Carolina, most of the facts are well-known, and among this group of Republicans, what happened has taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold case, with Karl Rove being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists, maybe working for the campaign, maybe just representing its interests, claimed in parking-lot handouts and telephone "push polls" and whisper campaigns that McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable from his captivity in Vietnam, and that the senator had fathered a black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of a South Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the black baby might influence their vote. Now here’s the twist, the part that drives McCain admirers insane to this very day: That last rumor took seed because the McCains had done an especially admirable thing. Years back they’d adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of the McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child inadvertently providing a photo op for slander. The attacks were of a level and vitriol that even McCain, who was regularly beaten in captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance, and lost the war for South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown upright and victorious . . . and onward he marched...
Something was rotten in the state of South Carolina, but where is the evidence that Karl Rove had anything to do with it?
It sounds like the work of some of the nether reaches of the Religious Right.
Posted by: Joe Willingham on September 16, 2003 06:09 PMThis is the first I've heard of these rumors, but I remember clearly what cost McCain the South Carolina primary: his virulent attacks on Christian conservatives. Those were front-page news for two weeks in advance of the primary, and generated a furious response from both the Bush campaign and Christian groups. McCain showed in those attacks that he wasn't serious about seeking the Republican nomination, and was only grandstanding for the national press. You don't attack your own party's base if you want to win the nomination.
Posted by: pj on September 16, 2003 07:35 PMJoe Willingham writes: "Something was rotten in the state of South Carolina, but where is the evidence that Karl Rove had anything to do with it?"
Was his candidate, or the opposition, anywhere near the state? That's enough evidence.
Karl Rove would flay toddlers if he thought it would be politically advantageous.
Posted by: Jon H on September 16, 2003 07:37 PMPJ: It was those rumors that triggered McCain's outburst.
Posted by: Walt Pohl on September 16, 2003 08:39 PMThe important thing to remember is that, the next time the NAACP protests, Joe and pj will deny that racism exists in America - except when Democrats practice it by talking about it.
Posted by: JRoth on September 17, 2003 08:59 AMEver since George Wallace ran as an independent and Nixon developed his "southern strategy", most of the southern racists have moved to a new home in the GOP and out of the Democratic Party of LBJ, the voting rights act, the end of Jim Crow, progressive governors like Graham, Clinton and Carter and prominent southern black politicians like Andrew Young and Julian Bond.
The white racists are a small but important part of the base that is easily energized by race policitcs. Of course, the politicians only speak to them in code (states rights, confederate battle flag, welfare queens, Willie Horton, and of course rumors of black children fathered by their opponents who love the other race and hate their own race). The race baiters use code so the other voters that are uncomfortable with racism and racists can cynically pretend that their politicians don't pander to racists.
Few white Democratic politicians have run in the South recently without some unsubstantiated rumors of fathering black children. Clinton's enemies had him rumored to have fathered a dozen children with a laundry list of black females. In McCain's case, no rumor was needed, just a picture and an insinuation. This is the oldest trick in the book in southern politics. Would a Bush campaign desperate for a primary win in SC and reknown for its hardball tactics use a trick like that? or promote it? or condone it? or allow it to happen and deny any responsibility?
Posted by: bakho on September 17, 2003 02:01 PMYep, I am proud to be among the McCainiacs who froth at the mouth at the merest mention of South Carolina, or the breast cancer calumny. The funniest thing about this is when I go into chapter and verse about the incompetence of the Bush administration, I am invariably met (this being San Diego, home of Libertarians who can't add) with, "Well, would you prefer Gore as President?". Answering that I supported McCain is met with a pained silence here in this Navy town.
Posted by: Jon Gallagher on September 18, 2003 06:41 PM