[Peace-discuss] article

[C. G. Estabrook]

[We should be careful of "running before our horse to market," as Rich.  
III says: racism is a means, not an end, in the Bush wars, just as it's a
tool, not a goal, in their domestic polices.  Here, on last week's
discussion, is Katha Pollit of The Nation.  --CGE]

Waving the Flag

[from the December 1, 2003 issue]

All right, so maybe Howard Dean could have thought of a better way of
reaching out to white Southern men than saying he wanted "to be the
candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." Maybe
he could have worked in a less fraught masculine symbol, and a less
emblematic vehicle, too--a gun rack on his Nissan? No, we don't want to
alienate the Million Moms and the UAW...make that a Budweiser in his
Thunderbird. Oh wait, that's illegal. Maybe Dean should just have made a
commercial: a good-looking, crinkly-eyed white guy in a T-shirt and jeans,
with just a few manly smudges, fishing with his little towheaded son while
Grandpa plays a harmonica and Tommy Lee Jones intones: "Send a man to
Washington: Send... Howard Dean." No wait, not Washington, they hate the
federal government down there. I give up!

People say they want politicians to get real, but just let one try to say
something not totally blow-dried and focus-grouped, and everyone piles
on--especially if, like Dean, he's the front-runner. Thus, white Southern
politicians like John Edwards and Zell Miller attacked Dean for
stereotyping white Southerners as racists when we all know nobody flies
the Confederate flag anymore, or if they do it's merely a symbol of
"heritage," while Al Sharpton accused him of failing to understand that
people who flaunt the flag are, in fact, racists. "It is simply
unconscionable for Howard Dean to embrace the most racially divisive
symbol in America," John Kerry mock-thundered. "I would rather be the
candidate of the NAACP than the NRA." Dick Gephardt chimed in that he
wanted to be the candidate for guys with American flags on their pickup
trucks. Isn't that special? It's a safe bet that none of these men believe
Dean is a racist, was making a covert racist appeal or was about to hoist
the Confederate flag over downtown Burlington. Obviously, Dean meant that
he wanted to win over working-class Southern whites who vote Republican
against their own economic interests for misguided racial reasons. William
Saletan pointed out in Slate that Dean has been using the Confederate flag
image to applause from whites and blacks alike for months. As he put it to
the Democratic National Committee in February:

I intend to talk about race during this election in the South. The
Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us.
And I'm going to bring us together. Because you know what? White folks in
the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back
ought to be voting with us and not them because their kids don't have
health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too.

What's wrong with that? Diane McWhorter, the Alabama native whose Pulitzer
Prize-winning Carry Me Home is the indispensable chronicle of the civil
rights struggle in Birmingham, thinks Dean may have "a tin ear for the
South." (We'll leave for another time the question of why there is no such
thing as a tin ear for the North.) My cousin Phoebe Pollitt, who teaches
school in Boone, North Carolina, thinks Dean made another cultural slip by
apologizing: "Most Southern white men in pickup trucks like plain-talking
folks, even if they disagree, but then to back down or pander when there
is criticism is a sign of weakness, 'un-real manliness,' so to speak. If
he wants to court the Southern redneck vote he shouldn't have apologized
but gone further talking about how the Republicans use the race card to
keep people distracted from the class issues." Says Phoebe's sister Susy,
a legal aid lawyer in Raleigh, "There is certainly a Southern white vote
for Dean to get here. Edwards won more than 50 percent of the vote for
Senate--but it is probably not the vote of men with Confederate flags on
their cars." Joe Trippi, would you please hire my cousins right away?

Tin ear or no, you've got to start somewhere--and isn't it honorable and
even brave of Dean to confront race and class head-on in these
pussyfooting times? Here is Dean, mocked by the media as a one-note
antiwarrior, champion of Vermont boutique cheesemakers and Internet
insomniacs, actually trying, maybe a little clumsily, to do what pundits
always tell the Dems to do--put down that brie, pick up a hunting rifle
and talk to the white working class about jobs, schools, healthcare.

Will it work in the South? That class can, and should, and someday soon
will, trump race has always been the dream of the "economic left." I have
to say I'm skeptical--Nixon's race-based Southern strategy has been moving
Southern whites vote by vote into the Republican corner for more than
thirty years. In 2000, Bush got 69 percent of the Southern white male vote
(and 62 percent of the Southern white female vote, not that anyone
cares)--that's a lot for any candidate to turn around. Forget the South,
one colleague advises. To win there Democrats would have to move so far
right they'd lose in other states. On the other hand, job losses and
casualties in Iraq have hit the South hard. "Ignoring the South is crazy,"
says Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies. He points out that
North and South Carolina alone have lost 180,000 manufacturing jobs since
2001. "These people--e.g. textile workers--aren't just having tough times.
They're losing their homes. They're out on the street." Why cede these
votes to Ralph Reed, who will be directing Bush's Southern operations in
2004?

Mostly, I suspect, the Confederate flag flap will serve as a plot point
for the media's cartoonish attack on Dean should he win the nomination. As
Gore was typed as boring and deceptive, Dean will be portrayed as arrogant
and hasty. Bush's verbal atrocities will be downplayed; Dean's
"insensitive" remarks will make headlines. The South will be America; New
England will be France; New York City will be hell. Nobody will
acknowledge this--what, you think there's a conspiracy? You think we all
meet together in a room and decide?--until someone does a study of
campaign coverage two years after Bush is re-elected and proves it.

Unless, of course, people see through the manufactured controversies and
wild exaggerations and fake outrage and vote with their heads.

[This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031201&s=pollitt]