Guns, God, And Gays
By Cathryn Crawford (12/16/03)
“I am tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays…” – Howard Dean
Howard Dean. He makes us want to vote for him, for a split second, the first time we see him. He seems, at times, reasonably intelligent, and even charismatic and attractive – and then he starts talking, and talking, and talking.
So Dean says he wants to win the South. He wants to be the lucky Democrat to take back the South from those “racially divisive” Republicans, and he wants to prove that a Democrat can win in the South. What he doesn’t understand is that he’s a prime example of exactly why Democrats do not win in the South, and why there’s no chance of that changing anytime soon.
His rationale for the Republican’s stronghold in the South is that Republicans appeal to the South’s love of fundamentalist values, guns, and racism. He constantly implies that Southerners simply don’t care about issues other than these – that we are, perhaps, too stupid to bother. On the December 7 edition of Fox News Sunday, Dean said the following to host Chris Wallace:
“What the Republicans have been doing since 1968 was actually the subject of a speech I'm about to give in a couple of hours here in South Carolina, is dividing us along racial lines by talking about quotas, dividing us about abortion or guns or other issues like that.
Well, let me tell you something about South Carolina. There's 102,000 children here with no health insurance. Most of those kids are white.
White people and black people in the South have a common interest. Their jobs are going offshore. They haven't had a raise because health-insurance premiums have eaten up all their money. They need -- $70 million was cut, got cut out of public health insurance -- public education here, because the president's economic program has been such a disaster.
Everybody deserves a break -- not just in the South, but everybody else. And working people, no matter what color they are, need to vote together, because their economic interests are not served by the Republicans. And I think that's why the election needs to be about health insurance, economic opportunity and jobs, and better educational opportunities for everybody. “
Now, the entirety of that quote is based around one assumption – that voters in the South choose candidates based on their stance on race, and that’s why the Republicans win here. He’s constantly bringing up race, pulling it out and putting it away as he wills. Why does he feel the need to point out some of the kids without healthcare are white? Does being white somehow entitle them to better or worse healthcare? And he thinks he has to tell us that white and black people have common interests? I can assure Howie that we knew that long before some pompous Vermont governor told us.
I can’t wait to see Dean get stomped in the South, and get stomped he will. We just don’t like to be treated like idiots. We’re not stupid. We know lots and lots about the economy, and politics, and foreign relations and heck, we even know about the Medicare bill! Some of us attend school and some of us have even learned how to wear shoes.
If you detect frustration, it’s because it is frustrating to constantly have (Yankee) politicians who appeal to a caricature of the South. You know the caricature that I mean - the one that rolls the Beverly Hillbillies and Barney Fife into one dramatic ball of oily accents and uneducated blather. The one that regards the majority of Southerners as either poor white folks that live in trailers and get together over beers to talk about lynching the black man down the street, or as poor black folks that white folks have kept down their whole lives. To those of us who live here, it’s silly – but it’s offensive.
And then there’s Dean’s assumption that Southerners are too stupid to differentiate between the two parties unless there’s something about race involved in it. What, so Southerners screen out all words other than “race”, “black”, and “affirmative action” when listening to presidential stump speeches?
If this were this case, Southerners would love Dean, since he somehow manages to work race into every speech that he gives. If he’s not talking about how much he hates talking about it, he’s using it – like the speeches he gives in Southern churches with Jesse Jackson Jr., where he repeatedly mentions every racially charged subject from segregation to slavery to the 1963 Birmingham church bombings. There doesn’t seem to be an attempt by Dean to bring these topics together into a relevant point; no, it’s just all about how Republicans are racially divisive, and how those events somehow play into how horrible the Republicans really are. I’m not even going to attempt to understand that one.
It leaves most of us down here in stupid-land shaking our heads. Somewhat in pity – as in, poor Dean, he’s so ignorant – and somewhat in anger. The old Hollywood stereotypes get old, especially when they’re encouraged by people who really should know better.
There was a big flap, as everyone knows, over Dean’s statement about reaching out to white people with Confederate flags in their windows. I think everyone was too caught up in that not-so-controversial statement to hear the one that he made last regarding that specific pontification: "I make no apologies for reaching out to poor white people." He’s living up to the caricature yet again – poor whites are the only people who drive trucks and own Confederate flags, in Dean’s little world. He certainly doesn’t know much about the people that he wants to represent, and he’s done nothing noticeable to find out.
Dean was a doctor and a governor, but he still isn’t intelligent enough to see that with his ignorant and bombastic comments, he’s writing his own script for a monumental loss.
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