Todd Rokita, Indiana’s Secretary of State, was addressing an all-white Republican dinner party, and compared the relationship of democrats and african americans to a master-slave relationship. From the article: "Rokita was the keynote speaker at Daviess County’s annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner Thursday. Part of his speech addressed the large numbers of black voters who support Democrats rather than Republicans.
“How can that be?” Rokita was quoted as saying by the county’s Washington Times-Herald newspaper. “Ninety to 10. Who’s the master and who’s the slave in that relationship?”
So, while trying to figure out why black people don’t vote for republicans, he says they are slaves to the democratic party. And he doesn’t see anything wrong with it. He gave one of those lame, “IF I offended anyone” apologies, the ones that imply that the person who is offended is the one with the problem. And I’ll bet he is still trying to figure out why black people don’t vote for republicans!
How does this guy remember to keep breathing? Fuckstick.
What the heck is so fucking hard about simply saying that he believes that there’s a patronage relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party? Which would have gotten a similar idea across without any of the landmines of his particular metaphor.
:eek:
Mr Rokita should ask himself how the party of Abraham Lincoln lost the black vote so badly. Perhaps it had something to do with the GOP seeking bigoted white votes in the South, rather than the black voters seeking to enslave themselves.
Sharecropping was/is not a uniquely black experience. I thought I’d throw that out even though I don’t understand the relevance of sharecropping to the thread.
I guess it won’t help to point out that not all black people live in the South, not all Southern blacks are Democrats, not all white Republican voters in the South are bigots, and that the Republican party doesn’t have a strategy for seeking only bigoted white Southerners at election time. Otherwise, you make a very lucid and well thought out argument.
True. However, regardless of where they live, if they are politically aware, they are aware of the Republican Party’s vote-seeking strategy.
And not all Southern whites are Republicans. But if (as the OP suggests) 90% of the black vote goes to the Democrats, then a similar proportion is likely to flow in the South.
I certainly did not say that. And in any case, there’s never a 100% correlation between any demographic and how people vote.
Indeed not. I live in Ohio, and remember how actively the Republican Party candidate sought Ohio votes in the 2004 presidential election. And he didn’t campaign so actively in most southern states (Florida being a major exception here), perhaps because his campaign managers thought they had the numbers well under control in most southern states. Of course, in order to win elections, you have to pitch your campaign at the middle, but that’s only after getting your base under control.
And the white Southern vote is now part of the Republican Party’s base, when 40 years ago it was part of the core of the Democratic Party’s base. That didn’t happen because the Dems deliberately tried to lose those votes: it’s because the GOP set out to win those votes.
I find it less offensive than this incident, which was virtually ignored at the time. For one, Rokita actually had a point, though he expressed it rather clumsily (in the same way that the sun is rather warm).
This blog, while specifically putting the Imus firing in perspective, does a very good job of tracing the Republican strategy of saying all the right things while still winking at the white racist voter they are targeting.
It’s a great read. Some samples:
“In 1980, while running for president, Ronald Reagan, appeared at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, best known as the site of the murders of three civil rights workers by various pillars of the community. There, he gave a speech about the need for states’ rights, time-honored code in that part of the country for white racists’ resentment over forced desegregation. The scene was generally taken as an unusually blunt reaching out by a major candidate to the bigot vote, and not long after, Reagan did indeed receive the KKK’s official endorsement for the presidency.”
“David Duke got himself elected to the Louisiana legislature and then set his sights on the governor’s mansion, and this, everyone agreed, was a crisis. No one was more upset about it than Republicans like Bush, who feared that Duke might be taken as representative of a part of the Republican party and give it a bad name. Duke didn’t stagger around calling people “niggers” and calling for a return to slavery. He talked about rising crime rates and too much money going to welfare families and a society gone to hell in a handbasket because of excess tolerance of the wrong sort and government sticking its nose in where it didn’t belong and making things hard for Mister and Missus Lily-White. In other words, he talked like Ronald Reagan and like a hundred other Republicans who had learned to speak in code to white bigots who felt that some measure of their freedom had been curtailed because black kids could sit next to their kids on the bus. The problem was, Duke had been a self-proclaimed Nazi and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. If Duke had appeared out of nowhere in 1989 with no paper trail and no photos of him wearing stastikas and prancing around his college campus toting a sign reading “GAS THE CHICAGO 7”, there would have been no reason for the media or his fellow Republicans to object to the obvious racist strain in his positions and statements; it would have been as okay as it had been with Reagan and Bush, because it would have been “just politics.” But Duke’s past made it uncomfortably likely that he wasn’t simply pandering to open-mouthed hillbilly bigots. Everyone agreed that he had no place in American politics, because he meant what he said.”
Perhaps a Rebublican politician is completely unaware of this history, but the fact this strategy has worked so well for them over the years makes it pretty unlikely.
[Hijack]I’m going on record here just a bit stronger about objecting to what appears to me to be a knee-jerk bashing of white Southern Republicans in this thread. Please note that the person who made the stupid racist comment is from the North. It was delivered at a venue in the North. The posters engaging in the South-bashing are from the North.
But, since y’all started it, I think it’s fair to point out that the current front-runner in the Governor’s race in Louisiana is Bobby Jindal, a Republican who is currently on his second term as the Congressional representative for the First District of Louisiana. He’s about as far from David Duke as you’re going to get.
So, please put down your broad brushes and look a little closer to home. Just take that beam out of your eye first, if you don’t mind, so you’ll actually be able to see.[/hijack]
If you’ll note that no one has said ALL Southern Republicans are racist. Just because my own brother-in-law from GA (born in Texas) is a Southern Republican and a racist is just that. He’s just one man. I’m sure there are others that aren’t.
Well, Mr Rokita was offering his theory on why Blacks generally vote Democrat. My response was that it has something to do with long-term electoral strategy for turning around the white vote on the South. Perhaps you could offer your theory on why voters switched around between the two major parties in the South over the last 40 years.
And I know that not all white Southerners are bigots, and I suspect that (as your link suggests) bigotry is decreasing in the South as well. But something happened to voting patterns in the South, and most observers see it as connected with the GOP courting the bigoted white vote in the South – a block which had been overwhelmingly voting Democrat between the 1860s and the 1960s.
True. The OP, however, is about the comments made by Indiana’s Secretary of State. You’re free to start a thread about Southern Republican bigots (of which I’m sure you can find plenty of individual examples) but I don’t see how it’s pertinent to the OP, unless one egages in stereotyping blacks, Southern whites, and Republicans.
My understanding of the way representative democracy is supposed to work is that the elected officials are our slaves. Well, slaves don’t get paid – so I guess we’re just voting for the hired help. “See, I got a job and kids and I have this yard here…why don’t you fix my healthcare for me? Thanks a lot.”
Not deliberately, but those of us old enough to remember the 1964 Democratic Convention recall the great battles about seating delegate slates with some black representation, strongly resisted by white Democratic politicians who became Republicans in the next few years - Strom for example.
I’m sure Ivorybill will deny that Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights bills had anything to do with the South going for him.
Since this is the Pit I guess I cannot object too strongly to your attempting to take this to a personal level, but I honestly don’t see how your doing so adds any value to your argument. And if you just want to bring up how awful things were/are/will always be about the South, hop on over to the The War of Northern Aggression thread.
I will stand by my points that:
Not all Southern white Republicans are racial bigots and therefore by proxy not all of the shift in voting patterns from Democrat to Republican in the South can be attributed to Republicans appealing to bigotry.
The OP is about the comments made by Indiana’s Secretary of State. He is the person being pitted.
There may be merit in starting a thread about white Southern Republican bigots.
There’s a lot of stereotyping going on in this thread.
Ah, but the Republican party very much did have just such a strategy. Whether or not that’s what Giles was referring to, it’s widely understood by students of political history that the 'Pubs did consciously, cynically use racial tensions to split the solid Democratic South – and that’s the nice version, I didn’t say “outright racism and race-baiting”.
You may feel – and are free to argue the case – that the 'Pubs currently have no such strategy, in which case any follow-up argument that black voters should now vote Republican would be that black voters are either stupendously forgiving or just ignorant of political history.