One of the underlying themes of Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie and Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal is how the modern Republican Party has relied on racial tensions for electoral gain. The exploitation of racism has varied in subtleties over the years, but the basic “Southern Strategy” has been consistent for several decades.
There was some talk in Republican circles that using race as a wedge was simply no longer a viable political strategy in the 21st century. It led then-RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, for example, to address the NAACP in 2005, in order to acknowledge how wrong the party has been on the issue. He conceded that Republicans, for decades, tried to “benefit politically from racial polarization.” Mehlman concluded, “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
So, can we throw Republican Southern Strategies into the dustbin of history? Apparently, not yet.
Strategists for Rudy Giuliani are quietly preparing a significantly race-based campaign strategy to strengthen support among socially conservative white voters, in the South as well as in the North. […]
The themes the campaign are lining up for renewed emphasis are those reflecting Giuliani’s confrontational stance towards black New Yorkers and their white liberal allies, as well as his record of siding decisively with the police against minorities who launched protests alleging police brutality during the years he was mayor from 1994-2001.
Giuliani’s eight years as New York’s chief executive exemplified a Northern adaptation of the GOP’s politically successful “Southern strategy” – the strategy playing on white resistance to and resentment of federal legislation passed in the 1960s mandating desegregation – resistance that produced a realignment in the South and fractured the Democratic loyalties of white working class voters in the urban North from 1968 to 2004.
It’s hard to know exactly what this strategy would look like in practice, but Tom Edsall’s report suggests Giuliani will appeal to white conservatives by emphasizing his conflicts with NYC’s African-American community. The idea, apparently, is to deflect attention from his positions on abortion, gays, guns, and immigration by pointing to race — the implicit message being: “How liberal can Giuliani be if he constantly fought with black people in New York?”
If Edsall is right, and this is the direction Giuliani’s campaign chooses to go, it would be shameless, ugly, and divisive … and exactly what we’ve come to expect of a man of Giuliani’s weak character.
In case there were any doubts about the stark animosity between Giuliani and New York’s African-American community, McClatchy reported over the weekend on just how much racial tension there was.
As the front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Giuliani is presenting himself as a unifier who cut crime and restored a sense of civility to a hard-boiled city. But many African-Americans recall Giuliani as a divider who exacerbated tensions by refusing to meet with African-American leaders — even elected ones — and stood solidly behind the city’s police amid a series of violent, racially tinged incidents. “There was a climate that police officers were willy-nilly violating civil rights with racial profiling and stop-and-search,” said Michael Myers, the head of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. “It was a climate, a culture, the mayor could have changed, but he didn’t. He has a ‘however’ record, very mixed, very disturbing from a standpoint of civil liberties and race.”
The article notes a series of racially-charged shootings, which exacerbated the tensions. In August 1997, for example, officers tortured and sodomized Abner Louima, a 30-year-old Haitian immigrant, with a broken broomstick in a Brooklyn police precinct bathroom. In response, Giuliani established a 28-member Task Force on Police-Community Relations. Giuliani not only ignored the panel’s work, but when it scheduled a hearing for the mayor to hear from youths who claimed they’d been abused or disrespected by police officers, Giuliani blew if off and went to a baseball game.
When assembling the list of reasons why Giuliani is an offensive presidential candidate, be sure to keep race high on the list.