OPINION
The lingering politics of race
Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics,” Thomas and Mary Edsall argued that a variety of social welfare programs became racialized after their creation or expansion during the Great Society era when African Americans were becoming more visible in American life; thus, taxes, social welfare programs, and race all became linked together in a politically potent “chain reaction.” Front and center was the food stamp program, used continuously during the Reagan era as an exemplar of the “problem” of big government. It’s back, with all its implied racial elements. While Cotton’s use of the food stamp issue is old school, Griffin’s implicit racial appeal is a bit more creative. At his “Sweet Tea with Tim” community events over the last several months, Griffin has regularly attacked a program that he terms the “Obamaphone” scheme. Just as with food stamps, the program is not an Obama administration creation. Instead, it is a program, called Lifeline, that goes back to 1984 when the FCC began working to provide phone service for low-income Americans to aid them during emergencies and as they sought out employment. For the last 17 years, the program has been funded by a surcharge on all phone users. (It’s in that list of charges on your monthly mobile bill.) Just under
200,000 Arkansans are served by the program, the majority of whom are seniors or veterans. With the demise of landlines, the program has shifted resources to providing cheap cell phones to recipients, and that is the special target of Griffin, who is the lead sponsor on legislation to outlaw this component of the program. The racial linkages to this program go back to a fall 2012 video trumpeted on conservative media outlets in which an African American woman from Cleveland wildly blares, “[Obama] gave us a phone, he’s gonna do more!”; with that, she became the “cell phone queen,” an echo of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen.” Fortunately, there is a recipe to undermine the effectiveness of these race-based attacks — to bring their racial elements to the attention of voters. Once the racial nature of implicit appeals is highlighted, researchers like Mendelberg have found voters are repelled as if the appeals were explicit in the first place. However, this is where Arkansas Democrats are caught in a trap. Noting the racial elements of the attacks inevitably means bringing up President Obama, perennially unpopular in many parts of the state. Arkansas Democrats would prefer to localize politics. To make Republicans pay the price for race-based appeals, however, it is crucial to expose the appeals for what they are.
to repeal the law of the land by defunding it. If that were the case, no law [would be] safe.” No federal court could rule otherwise. It’s a separation of powers issue. These principles are so fundamental to Amerilaw by the president. can governance that even the Wall Street Journal reminds GOP hotheads that for all Without proselytizing at all, everyone the three-ring thrills provided by Sen. Cruz immediately realand his allies, “the only real way to repeal the law is to win elections.” izes what an absurd The irony is that even if House Republiexercise in futility GENE cans ended up forcing a government shutall this nonsense LYONS really is.” down, the rollout of the Affordable Care A narrow Republican majority in the Act wouldn’t be much affected. Like Social House can’t void the Affordable Care Act Security and Medicare, Obamacare has its any more than 54 Senate Democrats can own dedicated funding stream that Conforce everybody in Oklahoma to eat broc- gress can alter only by amending the law coli. Anybody who tells you differently is a — again requiring the cooperation of both flim-flam artist. the Senate and White House. Such as Newt Gingrich. The presiding An even greater irony, many have genius of the 1996 GOP government shut- pointed out, is that if Republicans really down went on ABC’s “This Week” to deliver believed the law will prove a terrible failpseudo-historical profundity: “Under our ure, these last-minute theatrics wouldn’t be constitutional system going all the way back necessary. Their actual fear is that once the to Magna Carta in 1215, the people’s house notoriously uninformed American public is allowed to say to the king we ain’t giving gets first-hand experience with the Affordyou money.” able Care Act, they’re going to like it just fine. Actually, the U.S. Constitution of 1789 How else to explain the deceptive, Kochmakes no provision for a king. Neither, as funded TV ad campaign that coincides with former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Cruz’s Last Stand? Are people so gullible Reich has reminded Gingrich, does it “allow that they’re fooled by a horror film scenario a majority of the House of Representatives featuring a creepy Uncle Sam with a specu-
lum? “Don’t let the government play doctor,” indeed. Does that pleasant grandmotherly cancer victim really not grasp the differences between private health insurance reform and a “government takeover” of medical care? Maybe so, and maybe not. I’m inclined to suspect that the real objection to Obamacare isn’t so much the law’s contents as its sponsor and its perceived beneficiaries: the undeserving poor. Veteran political scientist Norm Ornstein recently told The Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers that “the bizarreness of this monomaniacal focus on Obamacare, given that it is fundamentally a Republican program from the 1990s mixed in with Romneycare,” says it all. “Obamacare relies on the private sector; there is no public option. That you are willing to bring the country to its knees to sabotage it … just shows this is a party that has gone off the rails.” Meanwhile, establishment Republicans are growing restive. Writing in The Hill, former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) complains that “These are folks who have never governed and are not inclined to do so. Rather, their goals are improved fundraising and, in some cases, individual advancement. They have hit on an issue that plays well on the stump, producing numerous effective oneliners.”
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e have reached a point where The two most direct appeals to voters based visible Republican on race are no longer effective members of the vote-getters. All except the relatively small Arkansas House delnumber of racial extremists recognize that egation — Tom Cotsuch rhetoric is contrary to the ideal of ton and Tim Griffin JAY equality and are repelled by demagoguery — are both engagBARTH of the type that moved voters so powerfully ing in just that sort in the middle decades of the last century. of politics as they begin their campaigns, That said, as evidenced in “The Race respectively, for the U.S. Senate and for Card,” political psychologist Tali Mendel- reelection to Congress. Their appeals are berg’s excellent work from several years racially tinged enough to move white votback, race-based appeals still have the ers, while maintaining plausible deniability power to move large numbers of Ameri- about the troubling elements. can voters. This is when the appeals are Cotton’s favorite topic of the moment is implicit rather than explicit. Such implicit the “Obama food stamp program.” Cotton appeals activate hidden racial stereotypes has become his party’s media point person in voters without raising the sort of psycho- on the issue, having led the charge to break logical red flags that scare them off. the SNAP nutrition program away from the The entrance of President Obama onto farm bill and then to remove an estimated the national stage has activated a flurry of 3.8 million recipients from the program. realpolitik uses of such group-based rheto- He continually ties the nearly 50-year-old ric and imagery in campaigns, as well as an program to the current president. As Cotupsurge of new research on the power of ton put it recently in an NPR interview: such implicit appeals. Some of that research “Mark Pryor voted for a food stamp bill. I has shown (unsurprisingly considering the want farm programs that are designed to race-scarred history of the region) that the help Arkansas’s farmers without holding efforts have particular effectiveness with them hostage to Barack Obama’s food stamp Southern whites. program.” In their classic book “Chain
The absurdity of the push to repeal Obamacare
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irst they lie to you, and then they ask you for money. That’s the essence of the great Tea Party/Ted Cruz crusade to “defund” Obamacare, a political and constitutional impossibility. The question was settled, probably for good, when President Obama won re-election in 2012 and Democrats kept control of the Senate. Instead, it’s about TV face time and harvesting donations from gullible voters misled both about the Affordable Care Act itself and Sen. Cruz’s nonexistent chances of ending it. Amid all the melodramatic TV chatter, the estimable blogger Digby puts it in terms everybody should understand. She has a friend in the insurance industry whose company has been getting thousands of calls from frightened policyholders who fear that the hullabaloo in Washington could result in their losing health coverage. “I asked her what calmed people down,” Digby writes, “and she says she tells everyone to think about their high school civics class and remember that laws have to be passed by both houses and signed into
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SEPTEMBER 26, 2013
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