They’re barely out of the gate, and some haven’t even declared, but the prospective field of GOP presidential candidates is off to a very bad start. Recently, a number of the presidential hopefuls have made race-related gaffes and other offensive comments that target racial minorities.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota), who offered the Tea Party response to president Obama ’s State of the Union address, recently hit the campaign trail in Iowa. She compared the national debt to slavery. “Fortunately today we don’t face the prospect of an armed violent civil war, but instead we face the question of whether our nation will live to the latest generation is equally great. It’s an underlying issue in the struggle of our time is a slavery of a different kind,” Bachmann said to the crowd in Des Moines, at an event sponsored by Iowans for Tax Relief. “Because it is a slavery. It is a slavery that is a bondage to debt and a bondage to decline,” Bachmann added.
Bachmann claimed the founding fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” Perhaps she does not know, or does not care, that in reality many of the nation’s founders owned slaves, including Benjamin Franklin, who owned two. Twelve presidents owned slaves, eight of them while living in the Executive Mansion. President James Madison had 106 slaves. President George Washington owned 316 slaves when he died, and had a dentist transplant nine teeth into his mouth that had been extracted from his slaves. Thomas Jefferson owned as many as 187 slaves — some of whom he fathered — even as he extolled the virtues of freedom and democracy.
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Bachmann also praised the “different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions” of the early European settlers in America, claiming that the “color of their skin” or “language” or “economic status” didn’t stop them from seeking happiness. “Once you got here, we were all the same,” she said. “Isn’t that remarkable? It is absolutely remarkable.”
Slavery is on the mind of the Minnesota Republican, and in a bad way. Last year, she told a gathering of conservatives in Denver that President Obama is turning the United States into a “nation of slaves.” It is hard to fathom that she would say the same about a white president. During the 2008 campaign, Bachmann declared that “Bachmann’s views are against America,” feeding into right-wing conspiracies that Obama is a foreigner born in Kenya and a Muslim terrorist. In 2009, she claimed that the President planned to place young people into re-education camps under the guise of volunteer public service programs.
Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi had a chronic bout of historical amnesia when it came to the civil rights movement. Barbour claimed he has little recollection of Freedom Summer in 1964, when the Ku Klux Klan brutally murdered James Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white New Yorkers, on June 21, 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi. “Not much,” Barbour said of his memory of that time. Sixteen years after the murder, Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia in support of states’ rights.
Last year, Barbour attempted to rewrite civil rights history when he claimed that his generation went to integrated schools. And he praised the racist White Citizens’ Councils — also known as the “White-Collar Klan” — that fought to maintain segregation in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi and throughout the South. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK,” said Barbour. “Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
Barbour, whose comments attracted a good deal of attention, tried to change the subject by freeing the Scott sisters, two black women who were serving double life for armed robbery — only $11 worth of goods. Barbour suspended their sentences on the condition that one sister donate a kidney to the other. The governor also announced that his state should build a civil rights museum. With segregated proms in the twenty-first century, brought to light in Morgan Freeman’s film Prom Night In Mississippi, you’ve got to love Mississippi. The same goes for Haley Barbour, a man who was raised in the middle of Jim Crow but can’t remember a bad thing about it.
Former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) couldn’t hold his Senate seat, and now he wants to run for President. The conservative created controversy when he criticized President Obama’s pro-choice stance on abortion, suggesting Obama should be pro-life because he is black. Presumably, Santorum’s rationale is that African-American once were regarded as less than human, and counted as three-fifths of a person in the Constitution.
“The question is — and this is what Barack Obama didn’t want to answer — is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no,” Santorum said on CNSNews.com. “Well if that person — human life is not a person, then — I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, ‘we’re going to decide who are people and who are not people.’” Oddly enough, Santorum — who thinks that fetuses are denied rights the same way that blacks were denied before the passage of the 14th amendment — presumes to know what black people should or should not think. In 2009, Santorum argued that President Obama “has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.”
Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, resigned from Congress in disgrace in 1999. Always a polarizing figure, Gingrich said that President Obama holds a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview — once again feeding into claims that the president is not a natural-born citizen and therefore illegitimate.
It remains to be seen if Sarah Palin, the former partial-term governor of Alaska, vice-presidential candidate and reality show celebrity, will run for the White House. In any case, she is always talked about as a possible 2012 contender. And her political action committee, SarahPAC, has $1.3 million in the bank. Her critics suggest her rhetoric may have contributed to the climate which produced the January 8 shooting in Tucson that left 6 people dead and 13 injured, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona). During the 2008 campaign, the U.S. Secret Service blamed Palin’s personal attacks on Obama’s patriotism — which often took place at campaign rallies in a lynch mob atmosphere — for the rise in death threats against him.
There’s a pattern here. The 2012 race hasn’t even begun, and yet so many of these candidates are aggressively alienating minorities. So what’s going on?
These racial gaffes and smears may tell us about the character of these candidates, or lack thereof, yet reveal far more about the Republican Party. The GOP is a mostly white and ultra-right, Christian nationalist and Southern party. Moderate and liberal whites fled from the scene long ago. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon were milquetoast centrists by the standards of today’s conservatives.
With Michael Steele losing his reelection bid for RNC chair, and a black GOP official in Arizona resigning after receiving Tea Party death threats, people of color have no leadership presence in the former party of Lincoln. People in the mold of Colin Powell need not apply. Those black Republicans who remain are expected to toe the line. Case in point: Rep. Allen West (R-Florida), the new black Tea Party congressman, recently went on an Islamophobic tirade against his colleague Rep. Keith Ellison. West referred to Ellison — one of two Muslim members of Congress — as someone who “really does represent the antithesis of the principles upon which this country was established.”
For the Republican base, which has been distilled to its hard-right core, racism sells. These are the folks who vote in the primaries. And since the GOP first depended on a Southern Strategy to woo Dixiecrats, racial division and intolerance have become the party’s crack cocaine. Fear of the “other” and speaking ill of black people, Muslims Latinos and gays wins elections. In a nation that is increasingly diverse, this is a losing political proposition in the long term. Meanwhile, for now, Michele Bachmann, Haley Barbour and the other presidential wannabes know exactly what they’re doing.