Over the course of the last few weeks Paul Krugman and David Brooks, both columnists for the New York Times, have been trading blows about Ronald Reagan. The general charge is that Reagan made coded appeals to white racism as part of his campaign strategy, consistent with the overall Republican electoral stategy since 1968. The specific charge is that Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi to send exactly that same message. Philadelphia was the town that killed 3 civil rights workers in the 60s, and Reagan’s speech touted his own belief in “states rights”.
Krugman started it by writing a column about the Republican raced based strategy, noting the Philadelphia speech as a case in point. Brooks responded by claiming that the speech was not a calculated part of any race based strategy and that anyway, Reagan didn’t open his campaign in Philadelphia and that basically, it was all just a big, but innocent, mistake. Krugman responded on his blog, pointing out quite effectively that Reagan had managed to make the same type of mistake over and over again.
Now comes Lou Cannon, Reagan’s many times biographer, into the breach. According to him, the charge is as follows:
Political mythologies endure. One myth that is enjoying a revival in a year when Republican presidential candidates are comparing themselves to Ronald Reagan, their iconic hero, is the notion that Mr. Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters.
This is in fact, not the charge that has been made, but we will let this pass for the moment. Cannon goes on to disprove the alleged charge by establishing, to his satisfaction at least, that:
1. Ronald Reagan was not a rascist. This fact is proven because Reagan had a black friend with whom he formed a bond back when he was a liberal. His stands against civil rights laws were merely principled constitutional stands having nothing to do with race.
2. The appeal to race didn’t work. This fact is merely asserted.
In some ways Cannon reminds me of the “moderate” who believes that, by definition, the truth must lie somewhere between the views of the left and the right. If it doesn’t, then one should fall back on non sequiturs.
Neither Krugman or any other responsible person that raises this issue has charged that Reagan was a racist. Reagan’s personal feelings on race are besides the point. The charge is that he, consistent with the Republican party’s overall strategy, sought to exploit and exacerbate racial tension to win votes. Even Brooks understands the nature of the argument. If Reagan wasn’t a racist then his actions were even more shameful, because even more cynical.
Nor does the argument made by Krugman include or depend on the claim that the Philadelphia speech succeeded in its objective. Whether Reagan was a net winner or loser by making that speech (and he did win Mississippi, after all) is also beside the point. While we punish them differently, there is little moral distinction between murder and attempted murder. There is just as little between trying to win votes by appeals to racism and actually doing so. If the Philadelphia speech was not a winner for Reagan, the overall strategy certainly was. As Krugman points out in his blog, the speech was only one of many instances of Reagan’s use of coded appeals to racists. He would not have continued the practice if he didn’t think it was working.
We must give Brooks points for, at least, dealing with the issue at hand. True to form he was disingenuous about it, but he accurately characterized the issue. Cannon eludes it and attempts to deflect it by asserting (certainly not proving) two propositions that are essentially unrelated to the core charge.
This is not just ancient history. The Republican candidates continue to rely on coded messages to various groups, whose common trait is intolerance of one sort or another. I don’t know if Giuliani is a racist. He probably has black acquaintances too. Whatever his personal feelings, Giuliani is crafting a race based strategy reminiscent of Reagan, et. al., and the candidates are falling all over each other to endorse various forms of religious intolerance. The fact that one or more of them may think that these people are actually yahoos is beside the point. They are currying favor with them to win, and implicit in that is a pledge to deliver for them down the road. It is beginning to look like these appeals to bigotry are losing their effectiveness, one of the few glimmers of hope we have in what is otherwise a rather bleak political scene. The Republicans have not given up, however. Hence their attempts to one up one another to prove their bona fides with the hate groups.
Speaking of columns in the New York Times, Tom Friedman proved he has learned nothing from the past 5 years and is ably skewered here.
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