| ||||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think  NewsPeople Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Travel & Food  Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon News stories, go to the
News home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon News Feature Feature Feature Feature Feature - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Together at last | page 1, 2
Because the racial demagoguery of Democrats like Waters is given free rein by a friendly media, it has spread through the ranks of the party right up to its leadership levels. Whereas Republicans are ashamed when publicly called on their use of the race card, Democrats have converted that same card into a usable political currency. Is there a minority candidate so biased, so incompetent or so corrupt that he or she should not be appointed to a federal judgeship or an ambassadorial post? To listen to President Clinton and Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., these days, only a racist would think so. Clinton and Daschle, of course, are too sophisticated to use terms like "racist" to describe the whole Republican Party. Instead they use crafty phrases like the one Daschle employed when Republicans recently rejected a Clinton nominee: "The array of anti-minority sentiment expressed almost each week now by Republicans is historic." But Maxine Waters and her colleague Rep. William Clay, D-Mo., -- who once described Gary Franks as a "negro Kevorkian" (on the grounds that he was a card-carrying Republican) -- are not so subtle. Recently, both of them absurdly labeled Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., a racist because he thought the same judicial nominee, a black Democrat named Ronnie White, was too soft on crime. The Democratic Party of Clinton and Daschle is not yet the party of Waters and Clay. Despite the pressures of its trade union reactionaries, it is still a party that supports free trade. Despite the racialism of its leftist core, it still acknowledges the need to mend the policy of government discrimination (while continuing to sponsor it behind the mask of "affirmative action"). But the balance of Democrats on issues that would reshape our political landscape in ominous directions is even less stable than it is among Republicans. Despite reluctant concessions to fiscal conservatism and welfare reform by "Democrats for sensible change," the party still clings to the political legacies of the bankrupt past. This is the party of ever expanding government power, of redistributionist agendas taken out of the book of socialist failure and of puritanical extremism in every area but sex (tobacco, guns, Hollywood "violence," SUVs). It is also the party of ever more cynical racial polarization. Recently, its racial McCarthyism has shown signs of veering seriously out of control. Democrats are now employing the strategy of the racial witch hunt not only in congressional conflicts, but in local disputes, with calamitous consequences for the communities involved. In Los Angeles, for example, Democrats have marshaled forces in the Hispanic community to prevent the removal of an Hispanic superintendent of schools on the grounds it is a racial assault aimed at Hispanics. But Ruben Zacarias rose to his position during a 17-year career as a lackluster bureaucrat in a system from which 47 percent of the children (two-thirds of whom are Hispanic) never graduate. A disgraceful percentage of those who do, moreover, never achieve more than functional illiteracy. If Zacarias were a white Republican, these same Democrats would be decrying the "institutional racism" of schools that produced these results, and would hold his tenure up as a prime example of the oppression of minorities by insensitive whites. As it happens, the effort to remove Zacarias is being led by a black leftist, Genethia Hayes, who was formerly head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and has had second thoughts about the politically correct policies that led to this mess. Her election, along with a reform-slate majority, was spearheaded by Los Angeles' Republican mayor, Richard Riordan, and by former Clinton pollster Bill Carrick. Not coincidentally, the same scenario is being acted out in New York. Herman Badillo, who was the first Puerto Rican borough president and a perennial mayoral candidate of the progressive left, is being tarred and feathered by his former colleagues as a "racist" and "traitor" to his community. For several years such charges were leveled at him by Democrats and "progressives" outraged at his efforts to reform City College (whose board he chairs) and reestablish its academic standards so that the minorities who attend can get a decent education. One city councilwoman even accused him of "ethnic cleansing" because he wanted to remove remedial courses from the college curriculum. Recently, he provoked another firestorm by observing that immigrants from rural Mexico and Central America, who have never learned to read in any language, may need special programs if they are to learn to read and write in English. Badillo's remarks on this subject were called "blood curdling" by the head of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, an entity funded by the Ford Foundation and entrenched in "progressive" political causes. Last year, convinced by such racially heated attacks that the left was firmly committed to reactionary agendas, Badillo became Republican. It is anybody's guess who will win the 2000 elections or which way the Democrat Party will go under the leadership of Bradley or Gore. It is anyone's guess which direction the realignment now taking place in American politics will lead us. But at this point in time, and in this election, it is a pretty sure bet that the stakes will be higher than they have been for a very long while.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer Table Talk Sound off - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon | |||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
