Why reward slick enemies?

Why reward slick enemies?

Did you notice how Gov. George W. Bush refused to spell out a clear, positive position on Affirmative Action during that final debate with Vice President Al Gore?

He just sputtered and sputtered until finally rescued by debate moderator Jim Lehrer.

Bush obviously was embarrassed because he was forced into exposing his true posture for or against specific vehicles for fairness towards Blacks, Hispanics and women. To do that he had to go against that powerful cadre of Republicans who handpicked him to seek the White House.

Playing ball with racists and all who think Blacks, Hispanics and women have advanced "too high" is a Republican decision made several years ago, one designed to give racist Democrats a home in the Republican Party. It grew out of the 1948 presidential election, when diehard reactionaries broke with Democratic President Harry S. Truman and joined renegade Sen. Strom Thurmond's States Rights Party, known as "The Dixiecrats."

While successfully defying society, Southern racists still remained outside of the political mainstream. But then came a corps of slick, unprincipled GOP strategists who offered them the luxury of unity within a major political party.

In 1964 the scheme became super obvious. When lynchings, assassinations, and police brutality had become commonplace, the Republicans nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater, the ultraconservative Arizona senator, for President. Goldwater fought tenaciously in the Senate against passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He lost.

While Southern violence and Northern race riots exploded, Goldwater proudly declared, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Too crude.

In 1968, Republican candidate Richard Nixon revived the scheme by pointedly opening his Midwestern campaign at Pontiac, where Michigan whites had halted integration by burning busses. Another message. It helped him win.

Then in 1980 came candidate Ronald Reagan, who chose Philadelphia, Mississippi, as the launching site for his Southern campaign. Another message.

For the Republicans, Philadelphia maintained one memorable claim to notoriety. It was the site of the 1964 multiple lynchings of three young Civil Rights workers, James E. Chaney, a Black, and two whites, Michael H. Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. It worked again.

Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act alone had been torture for unreconstructed Democrats who also had to stomach the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. More bitterness grew after passage of the 24th Amendment which banned the Southern poll tax.

However, the GOP noted that in 1964 an unreformed Alabama race monger named Gov. George Wallace made big inroads in the Democratic primaries of Maryland, Indiana and Michigan. The Republicans, like their current heirs, showed their tricky side once more. The GOP platform endorsed the 1964 Civil Rights Act while the delegates nominated for President Sen. Barry Goldwater, the act's ferocious enemy, but, Goldwater was too much for America, which the Republicans felt could accept a toned-downed version.

Just as Reagan won, while recalling memories of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, it was Republican George Bush, the former president, who sponsored those scary, Willie Horton race-crime commercials in his winning campaign. Bush did give Gen. Colin Powell a shot at national fame, but still, in the Republican tradition, he also appointed Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, where Thomas can damage Black hopes for 30 more years.

One example of a proper Black response to the clever Republicans is the 1964 election when 95 percent of the near six million Black voters rewarded Democratic President Lyndon Johnson and punished Sen. Goldwater.

If politics is the art of rewarding friends and punishing enemies, what better time for doing it again than on November 7.

Article Copyright Sengstacke Enterprises, Inc.