BoBo, Reagan And Race (updates...)

I know I covered some of this yesterday already in the Giuliani/Robertson post and I apologize for the repetition, but David Brooks of the New York Times decided to craft more propaganda today that requires a response.

Brooks is arguing here that The Sainted Ronnie R has been painted unfairly by we godless liberal blogger types as someone who just apparently happened to kick start his 1980 campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi (where three civil rights workers were murdered) as if by accident; Brooks argues, in fact, that Reagan really went there to speak at the Neshoba County Fair…

…Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.

Funny how Brooks fails to mention here that Carter ran against incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford from Michigan, as well as the fact that Ford was definitely not a “movement” conservative like Ronnie Baby (who ran against Ford for the nomination in 1976 and, by thusly splitting the Repugs, ended up helping Carter win).

So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and (Reagan biographer Lou) Cannon reported: “The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.

Oh, so the campaign was “famously disorganized,” huh? That was the reason why Reagan committed such a gaffe here. I see now…

(In Reagan’s speech at the fair he) told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”

How funny is it that BoBo fails to point out that “Democrat,” in this context, is more freeper code, as well as the evergreen “states rights” of course…

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.

OK, enough of this nonsense.

Here is a link to a column by Jack White of Time Magazine from December of 2002 in which he points out, among other things, that Reagan decided to begin his campaign in Philadelphia, MI at the urging of a then-young congressman from that state named Trent Lott. White also tells us that, when it comes to milking white anger and racial hostility…

The same could be said, of course, about such Republican heroes as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon or George Bush the elder, all of whom used coded racial messages to lure disaffected blue collar and Southern white voters away from the Democrats. Yet it's with Reagan, who set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, that the Republican's selective memory about its race-baiting habit really stands out.

And what’s interesting to me about White is that he is apparently sympathetic to Repugs, but said this anyway (based on the last paragraph of his column where he cites Dubya’s “commendable and long overdue campaign to persuade more African-Americans to defect from the Democrats to the Republicans”…way too damn funny).

This is typical for Brooks of course; trying to invent a false mythology of one type or another that favors his point of view is what he does for a living (as Glenn Greenwald notes here).

Update 1: And by the way, speaking of Wallace...

Update 2: Hat tip to Big Tent Democrat for this, as well as The Daily Kos - I forgot about the whole "welfare queen" thing.

Update 3 11/10: A little repetition here, but many good points also.

Update 4 11/11: I realize it would have been impolite for Krugman to call out Brooks by name, so incisive, almost-surgical sarcasm suffices here instead (h/t Atrios).

Update 5 11/12: Game, set and match to Bob Herbert for this.

Update 6 11/18: First of all, Cannon, nobody is saying that Reagan was a racist himself, and second, I don't give a flying you-know-what about what he said or did as a baseball announcer in 1931 - otherwise, I don't see you bothering to refute much of anything pointed out by Herbert or Krugman here. And I could probably say more about your utterly disingenuous column, but I'll leave it at that.