BACHMANN & RACE-BAITING

When Republican candidate George H.W. Bush unleashed his race-baiting Willie Horton ad against then Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential contest, politics in America reached a new low in terms of using bigotry and racial hatred to advance a political cause. In doing so, the Republican Bush co-opted the race-baiting mantle of former Dixie Democrat, Governor George Wallace, and used that mantle to secure the White House.

Bush's campaign chairman, the infamous Lee Atwater, confessed in a Life magazine article published a month before he did in 1991 that the Willie Horton ad was "naked cruelty" and apologized to Dukakis for the dishonest tactics Atwater authorized to advance the Bush campaign. Atwater acknowledged that his actions were reprehensible, but he forgot to apologize to the people most hurt by his campaign smear tactics – the Black community at large. Dukakis only lost an election. The Black community lost a measure of equality to which they were absolutely entitled.

I'd like to think that the political race-baiting days of Bush and Atwater were relegated to the dustbin of history, but that is just a pipe dream I have about racism and politics. The reality is that race-baiting still sells in many parts of this country. Just ask GOP presidential candidate, Rep. Michele Bachmann. She promotes race-baiting every day, to thunderous applause.

Here's how it works. Bachmann stirs up her adoring fans, an angry pack of Tea Party followers hell-bent on the elimination of the federal government, with claims of oppressive taxation and regulatory burdens that would make living under Stalin's thumb a Sunday school picnic. Then, she further enrages the crowd with a litany of government expenditures that she characterizes as government theft of an honest man's wages. The crowd claps and chants with adoring approval. Then, Bachmann goes for the jugular. She angrily charges that the President (who we all know is Black) authorized $1.2 billion in payments to Black farmers and the payments were waste.

What Bachmann doesn't say is more telling. She doesn't mention that Congress, in a bi-partisan measure, approved the payments first. The President simply authorized the payment of the checks, under Court supervision that required verification of claims. She doesn't mention that the Black farmers were entitled to that compensation for official discrimination committed by agents of the federal government over a period that spanned 40 years. She also doesn't mention that in 2010, she voted to provide over $20 billion in farm subsidies to corporate farms, largely owned by whites, not to grow crops.

Candidate Backmann's message is clear. It's not okay to subsidize Black farmers for decades of government discrimination because it's wasteful. It is, however, not wasteful to pay $20 billion to white farmers to sit on their butts and let their fields stand fallow. If that's not the definition of racism and bigotry, nothing is!