| The current flap over Senator Obama use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig" is so unworthy of a dignified Presidential campaign or any serious choice by the American public that it defies imagination. Need I tell you that no one, NO ONE associated Senator Obama's use of a common phrase political campaigns to Governor Palin until the McCain Campaign did. If you read Senator Obama's actual remarks, you'd be hard pressed to find anything of the sort aimed at Palin. The notion of Obama using "lipstick on a pig" as subterfuge is a Republican invention - they are the ones calling their own VP nominee a pig with lipstick.
Let's lay our cards on the table . . . shall we? Republicans have perfected these dirty campaign tactics. The Republicans can't win on issues because their party is at odds with the interests of the vast majority of Americans. This is because the Republican Party is in the grip of "movement conservatism." Movement conservatism serves the political needs of corporate and financial elites by espousing capitalism-without-constraints as a utopian vision . . . and as one of the litmus tests of Americanism. Consequently, Republicans have an allergy to doing anything that conflicts with the interests of Wall Street. The same people who bank-roll conservative politicians are the same people who brought us Enron, the collapse of private pensions, the current mortgage debacle, $4 gasoline, the crisis of our financial system and the looming recession. They can't run on their record because they are the problem!
But "movement conservatism" plays to people's fears. It has to. It must destroy people's hope for ever achieving a more just arrangement of society. Need I tell you that 9/11 was manna from Heaven to movement conservatives? It gave them a huge opportunity to drown hope by emphasizing fear. |
| But historically, movement conservatism has instilled fear through overt and covert racism. The conservatism of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Irving Kristol was going absolutely no where until the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The Republican Party won the South for the first time in modern history in 1964 because Barry Goldwater sided with segregationists and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. To his credit, Goldwater later recanted his position on that legislation. But it was the beginning of the dominance of movement conservatism in the Republican Party. It was the combination of unbridled capitalism and militarism with Southern social values - most notably racial prejudice - that made movement conservatism such a potent force in American politics. A century after Abraham Lincoln's appeal to "our better Angels," the political party he helped found thrived by feeding our worst demons. Nixon's "Silent Majority" - a concept formulated by his then-speechwriter Pat Buchanan - was a thinly veiled code for racism. It was a signal to white middle class patriarchs that Nixon believed Democrats had been too generous toward black folks . . . and, incidentally, he Nixon would correct the problem. How many people now remember that Ronald Reagan began his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi? That was the town where three Freedom Riders were brutally murdered in 1964 - and Reagan catered to the same folks who approved of segregation. Reagan's mantelpiece in the 1980 campaign was an endless assault on "welfare queens," also taken by many whites to mean black folks. During a 1984 Presidential Debate with Walter Mondale, Reagan longed for the days "before we knew we had a race problem." Conservative authors like Charles Murray used overtly racist arguments not only to argue for dismantling the welfare state, but to make arguments supporting the concept of racial inferiority - if you don't believe me, see Murray's The Bell Curve. Senator Trent Lott notably regretted the defeat of Strom Thurmond's overtly racist 1948 Presidential campaign on the States' Rights Party ticket. Conservative Republicans and old time right-wing Southern Democrats opposed and even filibustered key legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Republican Party across the United States has, for more than a decade, been on a crusade to purge Voter Registration lists. Most of those purged are African Americans and people of color. The main result of those purges is the Presidency of George W. Bush. Had it not been for the purge of voter rolls, particularly in the state of Florida, Bush could never have been elected. And who can forget Poppy Bush's use of the famous Willy Horton ad, which was produced by Roger Ailes, now the top guy at Fox News?
My intelligence is insulted when I hear someone say, "I'm not against Obama because he's black, I'm against him because I am a Conservative." Hey Pal, that's an oxymoronic statement, because conservatism is racism! Even when they figure they can't get away with overt racism, conservatives can find other issues meant to divide and conquer and play on fears and prejudices: such issues as busing, tax vouchers for private schools are the most closely related, but in a pinch gay-bashing, and opposition to women's issues (including reproductive choice) will also serve conservative aims, too.
The McCain Campaign is engaged in shameless baiting of Obama. They twist his words in hopes that they can fan the same flames that served Nixon and Reagan so well. It's obvious to me that they want to set up a conflict between Obama and Palin. A liberal black man against a white hockey mom who loves to tote rifles around - the imagery is tailor-made for Pat Buchanan, Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.
Don't be deceived about what's going on here! The movement conservatives who dominate the Republican Party - and who act like Sarah Palin is Joan of Arc - are setting up a scenario where they can pull in the redneck vote just like they have for 40 years. McCain hasn't discussed issues since the Republican convention started - he wants to play personalities. He wants to tell the American public that he's a war hero, Palin's a domestic heroine, Obama is "not like you," and Biden doesn't count.
McCain doesn't want to discuss the fact that his plans will leave the U.S. in Iraq well past the time that even the Iraqis want us there. He doesn't want to tell anyone that he has no ideas about how to create jobs except to give the corporate rich another tax swindle to bilk. He doesn't want to tell you that he's in the back pocket of big oil. He doesn't want to tell you that his healthcare reform plan does nothing to help people who have no health coverage - but does help big corporations unload the cost of health insurance onto their employees. He doesn't want to tell you that, like Bush, he wants to privatize Social Security, and thereby ransack the best run pension system in the world, in order to enable pension rip-offs like Enron and WorldComm. In short, John McCain wants to shaft the average working family in favor of the corporate rich and financial elites - he just doesn't want you to know about. The way he avoids admitting all this is to adopt a backward social philosophy that thrives on unspoken prejudices. When all's said and done, McCain, like movement conservatives before him, drapes the flag over his prejudices and frailties, and calls it "Americanism."
Huey Long once conjectured that "if fascism ever came to America it would be under the banner of 100% Americanism." McCain and the movement conservatives continue to put lipstick on a fascist pig - a fascist pig called conservatism -- and hope that the public is gullible enough to take the bait one more time. |
