THERE WAS A TIME, NOT LONG AGO — before Bill Clinton became our first black president — when the Democratic party was a domicile for racist demagogues like George Corley Wallace. In Wallace’s 1970 race for governor of Alabama, his supporters circulated thousands of leaflets cautioning, “Wake Up, Alabama! Is This The Image You Want?” The image was of a virginal, corn-haired daughter of Dixie, sitting stiffly on the beach, surrounded by seven leering black boys.
Nowadays, the Democratic party is . . . well, it’s still a haven for racial demagoguery. Consider the ad Missouri Democrats aired on behalf of their Senate candidate Jay Nixon. The ad thumped Republicans for the usual sins: despising Social Security, enriching the wealthy with tax breaks. But then it warned the listeners of the black radio station on which it aired: “When you don’t vote, you let another church explode. When you don’t vote, you allow another cross to burn. When you don’t vote, you let another assault wound a brother or sister . . . Vote smart. Vote Democratic for Congress and the U.S. Senate.”
It sounded like Missouri Democrats were doing battle with the Ku Klux Klan, not mild-mannered Republican incumbent Kit Bond, who was endorsed by the local NAACP and would end up coasting to victory with a third of the black vote. Not surprisingly, Missouri Democratic party chairman Joe Carmichael turns slippery when I ask him if it’s fair to depict Republicans as cross-burning church-detonators. “It was an ad that was produced by the Democratic National Committee,” he says. “I think what the ad really says is, if you vote Democratic, you’re voting for tolerance.”
DNC spokeswoman Melissa Ratcliff, on the other hand, says, “It was a state party ad.” That was also the line of DNC chairman Steve Grossman, when he admitted the ad was “wrong” on a pre-election Cross-fire show. But when I inform Ratcliff that the state party said the ad came from the DNC, she backpedals: “I don’t know; we may have helped them with it.”
What happened in Missouri happened in black precincts across the country in the days before the election. While the media were tracing the etymology of “putz-head” and debating at great length whether Al D’Amato’s Yiddish coinage amounted to an ethnic slur against Chuck Schumer, Democratic leaders went on a barely noticed race-baiting rampage to turn out African-American voters. Much of that effort was what the pros call “off radar.” So far off radar, in fact, that on election night one network, in a short story on negative campaigning, actually dredged up the 1990 Jesse Helms ad, in which a pair of white hands wad up a job application after losing out to an affirmative-action hire. But there was no need to haul eight-year-old video out of the vaults. Fresh examples of race-baiting were close at hand, though they wouldn’t have fit the morality play in which Republicans seek to divide by race, while Democrats urge harmony and inclusion.
Consider the Illinois Senate race. Incumbent senator Carol Moseley-Braun produced an ad juxtaposing Republican Peter Fitzgerald with an image of a Confederate flag. This was quite a stretch. Fitzgerald’s lived in Illinois his whole life. What was her justification for painting him as a neo-Confederate extremist? One of Fitzgerald’s staffers had passed out campaign literature at an anti-tax rally organized by Thomas Fleming, an advocate of Southern secession who edits the magazine Chronicles in Rockford, Ill.
In the Ft. Worth, Texas, district of Democrat Martin Frost, the country Democratic party sent black households flyers featuring a picture of Martin Luther King next to another picture of an angelic little black girl. While King “had a dream for all children,” voters needed to take care not to “let Republicans take that dream away.” Why? Because “Republicans are so desperate, they are willing to resort to anything — even voter intimidation — to keep Democrats from passing laws that help our community.”
No excuse was too piddling for injecting race into the campaign. In Georgia, when Republican gubernatorial candidate Guy Millner called his white opponent “Lawyer Roy Barnes,” Barnes suggested that people “who have stereotypes . . . for folks like lawyers, generally have stereotypes for other minorities. What, privately, does he call Jews? What, privately, does he call African-Americans?”
Up the eastern seaboard, Maryland’s Democratic governor Parris Glendening destroyed Republican challenger Ellen Sauerbrey, though they’d spent much of the campaign in a dead heat. That is, until Glendening played the race card three weeks before Election Day. With an assist from adman Robert Shrum, himself no stranger to employing Klan imagery when taking on Republicans, Glendening carpetbombed Sauerbrey in TV ads that claimed she voted against “the civil-rights act” and that she had “a civil-rights record to be ashamed of.”
The civil-rights act in question was a 1992 state bill that would have permitted sex-harassment suits to be brought in Maryland courts instead of federal courts. The bill was killed by a Democratic majority, and even Maryland’s black House speaker voted it down. So over-the-top was Glendening’s claim that he was even repudiated by his uneasy ally, Baltimore’s black mayor Kurt Schmoke, who refused “to participate in a campaign to try to persuade people that she is a racist.”
Black congressman Albert Wynn managed to top even Glendening’s over-the-topness. Targeting every residence in his mostly black district in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, Wynn mailed Election Day get-out-the-vote cards that featured German shepherds and baton-wielding cops bullying blacks in Bull Connor’s Alabama. The cards read, “A Voteless People Are a Hopeless People.”
So eager were Democrats to deal the race card that even blacks weren’t immune to charges of racism. In South Carolina, black Democratic state senator Robert Ford campaigned with a vengeance against governor David Beasley, the Republican incumbent. In an ad that ran 28 times between October 30 and Election Day on Columbia’s largest radio station, Ford accused blacks who didn’t come out to vote against Beasley of being “no different than the Ku Klux Klan.” Why? Because, Ford charged, “Beasley and his Republicans” were about to “take away 50 years out of the civil-rights movement.” Untrue, unless video poker, which Ford plays nightly and Beasley opposed, is a civil right. Beasley, who fought his own party by advocating the removal of the Confederate flag from the capitol dome, lost by seven points in a state where blacks constitute 20 percent of the electorate.
The campaign to provoke racial hysteria was not just local. President Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the Justice Department reinforced it on the homestretch. On the Saturday before the election, the DNC voiced suspicions, based on vague “reports,” that Republicans would be engaging in “voter intimidation” to suppress turnout by minorities. How would they do this? By videotaping voters under the guise of guarding against fraud. (Why Americans, millions of whom are videotaped daily withdrawing cash from the bank and buying Twinkies at the 7-11, would be intimidated by a polling-place video went unexplained.) And on the Sunday before the election, Clinton played his part. In an interview with a reporter after “worshiping” with Maryland Democrats at a black church in Baltimore — one of several interviews the newly accessible Clinton did with black reporters that weekend — the president declared that “to scare people off from voting is totally abhorrent . . . This is not American, this whole voter-intimidation business . . . . I would challenge the Republican party to stand up and stop it.”
When reporters tried to substantiate this “voter-intimidation business,” and almost none did, White House spokespeople and the DNC were hopelessly vague on the details of the Republican plot. Nonetheless, on the day before the election, the Justice Department entered the election campaign with a Nixonian flourish. Attorney general Janet Reno declared, “We will not tolerate harassment of minority voters.” In order to protect minority voters, the Justice Department announced that videotaping voters “could constitute a violation . . . of the Voting Rights Act.” What’s more, in response to unspecified complaints about the possibility of “voter intimidation,” Reno said the department would dispense 141 federal observers to five states.
Strangely, none of these monitors was actually sent to the states that the DNC had complained about in its press release. In fact, none of the 141 observers was even sent to monitor “voter intimidation.” Instead, according to the fine print on the Justice press release, they were sent to Native American and Chinese communities to make sure bilingual ballots were provided. Stranger still, after the election, no instances of minority “voter intimidation” were reported. The White House referred queries to the DNC. The DNC didn’t know whether any instances had occurred, but congratulated itself on its preemptive vigilance.
Justice Department spokesman Will Mancino is the only person offering anything approaching an answer. He says Justice didn’t find any widespread impropriety, though it wouldn’t go public if it had — unless it was filing suit, which it isn’t. As for the “complaints” that launched the investigation, he says he can’t say exactly who made them. One came from a Congressional Black Caucus member. Four or so others came “from state representatives, Congress, but I can’t elaborate further.” Most, he says, were “concerned with the videotaping,” although, he adds, “videotaping itself doesn’t constitute a violation” of the Voting Rights Act.
As for the president, reinvigorated by his success at turning back the Republicans’ un-American voter intimidation, he may want to reprise his 14-month long Initiative on Race. The one where he said something about trying to “be one nation together,” to “move beyond division to community,” to “get people together across all the racial . . . lines that divide America.” Just like he did during Election ’98.
Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
