In mid-June 1994, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Robert Casey, was attempting to marshall support for a welfare-reform package in the state House of Representatives. Those House Democrats who supported the reform had been repeatedly thwarted by fellow Democrat Dwight Evans, chairman of the Pennsylvania House appropriations committee and the state’s highest ranking black lawmaker. And one of Evans’s antagonists had finally had enough.
Evans, state representative Terry Van Horne told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is all too often “preachy,” “glib,” and “condescending” about budget matters. Which makes him, Van Horne went on, just “another inner-city nigger.” And “I don’t use that word lightly.”
Oh dear.
Fast forward six years. Today, Terry Van Horne is a candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania’s fourth Congressional District. And the word he does not use lightly is — properly so — a campaign issue.
Or at least it was one until he won the Democratic nomination. During the primary, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), concerned about the N-word problem, broke with standard practice, and openly funded Van Horne’s principal opponent. But now that Van Horne.faces a Republican in the general election, Washington’s Democrats have suddenly developed selective amnesia.
“I did not know about it before-hand,” House minority leader Dick Gephardt says in response to criticism of Van Horne from RNC chairman Jim Nicholson and Republican Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Tom Davis. “But as I understand it, he has apologized for this statement” — the one that Gephardt didn’t know about, the one that inspired the DCCC to fund Van Horne’s opponent. Van Horne, Gephardt goes on, “has gotten the support of his colleagues in the Pennsylvania House, including the person the statement was directed to.” And so “we will support him and we’ll try to help him win this seat.” You know: “It’s an old event. It’s six years ago.”
So forgiving, these Democrats.
If Van Horne were a Republican, THE SCRAPBOOK imagines, Dick Gephardt would quite vividly remember that he is a vicious bigot.
