TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112591/1125103.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.0 KB | 211 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 44

POLITICS

Why Bigotry Still Works At Election Time


When politicians rail about crime, welfare or Big Government,
they are often really talking about race

By DAN GOODGAME/WASHINGTON


    Demagogues don't yell "nigger" or "Jew boy" anymore.
They've learned better. Just as David Duke shed his Klansman's
sheets and Nazi uniform for the well-groomed banality of a
suburban stockbroker, he traded in his bigoted rhetoric for a
slick new glossary of coded appeals to racial resentment, market
tested over the past two decades by mainstream conservative
politicians. When Duke, following Richard Nixon's lead,
denounces hiring "quotas," many among his white working-class
supporters hear him saying, The government is going to give your
jobs to blacks. When Duke, like Ronald Reagan, castigates
"welfare queens," nobody has to be told what color they are.

    John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, observed in
the course of denouncing Duke on the eve of last Saturday's
election, "If he succeeds, it will be by appearing to run not
as a racist." Yet the sad truth is that Duke has been exploiting
a political style and strategy that Governors, Senators and
Presidents have been using to win elections since 1968, the year
Democrat George Wallace demonstrated that white populism,
stripped of overtly racist language, could attract support
outside the South.

    Disguised race baiting persists in politics for a simple
reason: it works. "Some of us would like to get beyond this
business of scaring people and dividing them against blacks,"
says one of George Bush's closest political advisers, "but it's
hard to argue against a formula that's seen as successful." The
tactic has succeeded best in states and districts where the
minority population is large enough that whites can be made to
feel threatened by it. When George Brown ran for re-election as
Tennessee's first black supreme court justice in 1980, he says
he got more support from white hillbillies who had never met a
black professional than he did from whites in the Nashville
area, where, Brown says, "a lot of whites think they know about
blacks."

    Racial tactics can backfire if they are ill-timed or
overly strident. Many white voters will abandon any candidate
who they judge has crossed the line into blatant racism. Several
top political aides, including the late Lee Atwater, counseled
Bush to sign the civil rights bill passed by Congress last
year, rather than make an issue of quotas so long before his
next campaign. "Quotas are a legitimate issue," says one G.O.P.
strategist, "but I thought it couldn't be sustained for 24
months without making a mistake. And when you make a mistake on
this issue, it's a big mistake because it gets you labeled
racist, and there's nothing more sensitive with our yuppie
constituency."

    While many politicians are accused of employing racial
euphemisms, all deny guilt. The line between legitimate debate
and appeals to racism is often fuzzy and turns on the good faith
and background of the candidate. Candidates rarely play the race
card as baldly as North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms did in 1990
in his race against Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former
mayor of Charlotte. Helms, who refers to blacks as "Freds" and
has for decades been hostile to civil rights legislation, was
eight points behind Gantt three weeks before the election. Then
he ran an 11th-hour TV ad showing the hands of a white man
crumpling a rejection slip for a job that had been reserved for
a "racial quota." Many Republicans as well as Democrats
denounced the ad for inflaming racial animosity. But it worked:
Helms came from behind to win, 52% to 48%.

    In other cases, however, Republicans as well as
conservative Democrats protest that many blacks and liberals are
too quick to cry "racist" at any attempt to discuss explosive,
racially tinged issues such as welfare, crime and affirmative
action. "There is no reason for Republicans to be ashamed to
talk about racial preferences in terms of equal opportunity,"
says former Republican Party chairman Bill Bennett. "You're
probably going to get called a racist, but that won't stick if
you establish credibility on these issues by spending time among
black people, in schools and on street corners," debating them
instead of talking about them. Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, who
spends more time among working-class blacks than any other Bush
adviser, says that "if you don't have a positive message to
balance talk of racial quotas, you're going to come across to
blacks as discriminating."

    In the recently published book Chain Reaction, authors
Thomas and Mary Edsall write that race "is no longer a
straightforward, morally unambiguous force in American
politics." Instead, the Edsalls contend, considerations of race
permeate voter attitudes toward such issues as taxation, equal
opportunity, public safety and moral values. Racism alone, they
say, fails to explain why large numbers of white, formerly
Democratic voters have defected to the G.O.P. Worse yet, from
the Democratic standpoint, blasting the defectors as bigots
instead of exploring the complicated reasons for their
disaffection only angers them. "Democratic liberals' reliance
on charges of racism guarantees political defeat," the Edsalls
write, "and . . . guarantees continued ignorance of the dynamics
at the core of presidential politics."

    Though some Democrats hope Duke will sully the G.O.P. as
a racist party, Democrats must share the blame for Duke's
success and the rising national appetite for Duke's scapegoating
style. Leaders of both parties attribute Duke's appeal to rising
unemployment, yet as Democratic strategist James Carville, a
native of Louisiana, observes, it is Democrats who are held most
responsible for "failing to define ourselves as we traditionally
have, as the party that defends the interests of working people
of all races."

    Polling and focus-group studies by both parties show that
working-class voters increasingly believe the system is loaded
in favor of the rich and the poor, at the expense of the middle.
"They see that the top of America and the bottom don't operate
by the same rules as the rest of us," says Elaine Kamarck,
senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington.
"The big executives run companies into the ground and give
themselves big bonuses. The welfare recipients take drugs,
engage in crime and have babies they can't afford, while the
legal secretary is scrimping and saving to afford another kid."
These voters consider both parties to be controlled by wealthy
campaign contributors but view the Democrats as also beholden
to other "special interests," including blacks. Many of Duke's
supporters "don't resent blacks as blacks," says a Republican
pollster. "They resent them as a special-interest group that
gets special favors."

    Democrats also must share with Republicans the
responsibility for the barrenness of political debate in which
Duke has thrived. When the subject is welfare, for example, few
leaders of either party point out that the major programs for
the poor constitute about 6% of federal spending -- far less
than the value of corporate tax breaks and other welfare for the
wealthy. "You can't write off Duke's voters as racists," says
Tony Snow, the chief White House speechwriter. "Duke is talking
about things people really care about: high taxes, crummy
schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal
opportunity. A lot of politicians aren't talking about these
things."

    Harris Wofford, the liberal Democrat who upset former
Attorney General Dick Thornburgh for a Senate seat from
Pennsylvania two weeks ago, understood the impatience of
working-class voters with Democrats who talk more about the
agendas of gay and feminist activists than about lunch-box
economic issues. Wofford avoided that mistake by talking mostly
about jobs and health insurance. Fred Steeper, a Republican
pollster who surveyed Louisiana voters before the recent primary
vote, observes that "Duke is tapping into the same middle-class
frustration as Wofford" -- but in a far more destructive way.

    Duke ran for President (on the Populist Party ticket) in
1988 and may well do so in 1992 (as a Republican). And although
most of Bush's political advisers see little threat to the
President's re-election from the ex-Klansman, some fear he could
peel away Republican votes as a third-party candidate in the
general election, as Wallace did to the Democrats in 1968 and
1972. If Duke runs, he will surely attack Bush for signing a
civil rights bill little different from the one he vetoed as a
"quota bill" in 1990.

    Bush believes his racial attitudes are above reproach
because of the support he has given the United Negro College
Fund since he was a Yale undergraduate in the 1940s and because
he has reached out widely to black leaders and spoken at black
colleges. At the same time, critics observe, Bush opposed the
1964 Civil Rights Act. During his 1988 campaign, Bush almost
never went into black neighborhoods to ask for votes. And his
campaign relied heavily on TV spots focusing on Willie Horton,
a black murderer who raped a white woman while on furlough from
a Massachusetts prison.

    Bush has a talent for convincing himself that his motives
are pure. When he nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme
Court, for example, he was asked whether it mattered to him that
Thomas was black. "I picked the best man for the job," Bush
declared, adding that if Thomas happened to be black and
maintained a black presence on the high court, "so much the
better." That would seem to be Bush's attitude toward racial
code. When his campaign harps on Willie Horton, Bush believes
he is only making a point about crime. If some voters find the
pitch more persuasive because Horton is black -- well, so much
the better.