DNC Chair: GOP Wants To “Drag Us All The Way Back To Jim Crow”

Mark Jaws writes:

As I said to you last week, no group on the Left has more frequently and effectively used the race-hammer to bludgeon white conservatives than liberal Jewish politicians and media pundits. Here is DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz doing what she does so well.

LA replies:

I don’t think she’s doing it well at all. She sounds like an idiot. Republicans want to “literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws”? Meaning, Republicans want to have laws that require whites not to hire blacks or sell them property? What bothers me more than Wasserman’s idiocy is the fact that no Republican counterpart of hers will challenge her point in a way that shows its idiocy. They most they’ll do is smile and say, “There you go again, calling us racists.”

Here’s what she said:

“[I]f you go back to the year 2000, when we had an obvious disaster and—and saw that our voting process needed refinement, and we did that in the America Votes Act and made sure that we could iron out those kinks, now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally—and very transparently—block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant,” DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL) told TVOne’s “Washington Week.”

Insane. What Republicans are trying to do reduce the recent trend to pre-election day voting. Because more blacks than whites vote before election day, Wasserman calls this a return to Jim Crow.

In other words, any policy which happens to affect blacks negatively more than whites negatively, is a return to Jim Crow.

This reminds me of the epiphany I had back in the ’80s which I wrote about in the chapter on the meaning of racism in The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism. The Koch administration was planning to close a hospital in Harlem, as an economy measure, and the Democrats, to my shock, called this “racist.” I realized how “racist” now effectively meant anything that might affect some black people negatively or, more simply, anything that some black people didn’t like.

Which is where we still are now. Blacks support Obamacare more than whites. So if Obamacare were stopped/repealed, a greater proportion of blacks would be unhappy about that than whites. Therefore opposing Obamacare is racist.

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Ken Hechtman writes:

You wrote:

“Insane. What Republicans are trying to do is reduce the recent trend to pre-election day voting.”

I’m confused. Why do Republicans want to limit advance-voting? In Canada, we have the same trend to higher levels of advance-voting every election. Elections Canada (our equivalent of the FEC) comes up with new ways every election to make advance-voting easier. Same thing at the provincial and municipal levels. The election authorities like it because it raises turnout. The parties like it because advance-votes are in the bank and can’t be affected by late-in-the-campaign mudslinging. The voters like it because it’s convenient. What’s the Republican objection?

LA replies:

I don’t know what their stated objection is. Personally, I hate non-Election Day voting (other than absentee and military, obviously) as it destroys the meaning of Election Day, the one day when the people act together as a community in a shared public ritual. It turns voting into just another personal convenience, just another consumer experience. So I support any measure to limit voting to Election Day. But I don’t know what the Republicans’ reasons are.

Thucydides writes:

Comments like Debbie W-S’s are reinforcing the image in the voters’ minds that the Democrats are the party of and for the interests of black people at the expense of the whole. The smear that Republicans want to reinstate Jim Crow is so over the top that it surely offends far more people than it gratifies. It is so extreme that it is doubtful that it should be dignified with a denial. Instead, any response should focus on the Democrats’ policy of exacerbating racial animosity in order to drive up Democrat black turnout, something we are going to see reach incandescent levels of intensity as we approach the 2012 election. This is something that in a bygone era liberals once used to be against.

Thucydides continues:

The Republican concern over advance voting is likely based on the fact that such balloting has often been the primary vehicle of Democratic vote fraud. Once preliminary vote counts are in on election eve, if it is at all close, blocks of absentee ballots are suddenly brought forth to determine the result.

The blogger OneSTDV writes:

Recall that it was Wasserman-Schultz who lead the campaign for “civility” back in January.

Steve W. writes:

Actually, I don’t think her comment is “insane” when viewed from a political rather than an intellectual perspective.

This is the key phrase: “now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally—and very transparently—block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.”

Obviously Republicans don’t want to “literally” return the country to “Jim Crow laws,” But most voters (and non-voters, who exercise their political influence in other ways) don’t know what Jim Crow laws are, historically and legally speaking, and so do not see anything crazy with this assertion. Most people also misuse the modifier “literally” as often as politicians do, and so, again, do not see anything logically or linguistically problematic with this claim. Instead, what they hear is a liberal politician saying that Republicans want to adopt policies that are contrary to the perceived interests of blacks and other minority groups. This is hardly insane—it’s true. Moreover, Republicans, at least some of them, do want to “block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote” for Democrats than Republicans. Two such groups are convicted felons and illegal aliens. Even if Wasserman Schultz is mischaracterizing the nature of the specific voting rights issue in question (I don’t know), the basic thrust of her comment is accurate, from a political perspective. In the court of public opinion (as mediated by the liberal media, of course), I think a Republican politician would have a hard time demonstrating the “idiocy” of her remark. Is she “playing fair” and phrasing her criticisms carefully? Of course not. But why would we expect her to? For liberals, politics is total war.

LA replies:

That’s an excellent comment.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 10, 2011 10:12 AM | Send