Tom Hayes: Consequences of "gotcha politics" aimed at Senator Reid

Melissa Harris-Lacewell offers an excellent perspective in her piece "What Reid's Race Gaffe Tells Us About Inequality" today at The Nation. Nobody's surprised that the opposition party would leap on such a gaffe, but if they really want to accomplish change they'd be focused on more than one politician. The focus has clearly been a virtual frenzy - a "tar-and-feather the heathen" first, ask questions later approach - the sort of "gotcha" that McCain and other prominent GOP members famously claim to oppose.

Is Senator Reid above criticism? Absolutely not. His choice of language reveals something of his social context and the resultant view of the world. Clearly conversations about race in his circle are lacking, and his experience is insulated from the way most Americans live.

But creating what political theorist Nancy Fraser calls, "a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price for equal respect," isn't what the elite right-wing strategists or the supporting talk-show punditocracy is calling for, (or presumably hoping to achieve.) Their goals appear much less lofty: attack the party of the President to weaken his political influence, one member of Congress at a time.

Naturally some of GOP politicos and voters are applauding the response to the gaffe. But rather than the tactics Americans who want to reclaim moral high-ground while rebuilding the leadership role for their country on the world stage need to succeed, these reveal a willingness to return to the arrogant do-anything, say-anything tactics of fear for short-term political advantage that most Americans voted to curtail in 2008.

Thomas Hayes is an entrepreneur, journalist, and political analyst who contributes regularly to a host of web sites on topics ranging from economics and politics to culture and community.

Tom Hayes: Fiscal conservatives looking for new dance partners

During the latter part of the 1900s and the Bush years the GOP often seemed one solid, united front of like-minded folks. It's actually nearly as diverse a coalition as the Democratic party, built around a core of old-money, anti-regulation businessmen that, at times, has held its collective fiscally conservative nose to take advantage of voters that just don't feel comfortable with the Democrats (and liked the sound of lower taxes.)

To their great delight at the time, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered any states that were bastions of white racism in the mid-1960s to the GOP for electoral purposes - largely what we call the "old south." The GOP wielded that sudden influx carefully, and with discipline over the following decades became deft at appealing to this constituency while carefully avoiding any overtly racist public statements.

As Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Professor of Politics and African-American Studies at Princeton University, noted regarding President Carter's recent observations about racism:

"There is something particularly compelling when Southern white men identify, name, and condemn racism. America can never forget what it sounded like..." to hear LBJ say something similar while he was President:

"What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome."

Nobody noticed more, or denied it more vehemently, than racists themselves. LBJ knowingly drove white racists to abandon the Democratic party en masse, and most turned to the GOP, where many have remained. While there are other factors that lead people to criticize President Obama and/or his initiatives, assuming racism is not a factor for some of Obama's detractors is either naive or self-delusional. For racists to think they've managed to conceal their beliefs from most of the rest of us, that we just plain don't realize what's going on, is hubris so blatant it beggars my descriptive powers.

Where will the GOP go now?

To the consternation of the fiscal conservatives in GOP, the Bush~Cheney administration's actions spending to fund their fruitless hunt for Osama bin Laden and the disingenuous hunt for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq have driven many moderates out of the party while crippling the financial might of the country, and they are left with the "not ready for TV" tea-baggers and some barely disguised racists as key parts of their voting base in many areas. The various ratings-driven, faux-histrionic "conservative" pundits are not solidifying the GOP power in the coming election cycle any more than the hypocritical shenanigans of Mike "Spanky" Duvall, Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, or Mark "Don't cry for me, Argentina" Sanford, which have yet to fade from the public's memory.

Ironically, fiscal conservatives have to hope for a kindred spirit in President Obama, who is considerably more socially and economically moderate than he is painted by the media. For Obama has no choice but to spend given the state of the U.S. economy as he starts his first term: the impact of the unfunded military spending and the credit and financial crisis will reverberate for years, possibly decades. While Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner takes point in the media limelight, with the President intent on bringing fairness to the Health Insurance industry, the dances taking place off-camera in D.C. must be truly epic.