Taking Tim Scott At His Word

The day after President Biden delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress and Republican senator Tim Scott gave his rebuttal, I noted

We can have a sociological or philosophical debate as to whether the USA is "a racist country."  However, if a guy who has experienced what Scott says he has experienced (and still experiences) insists that country is the greatest and not racist, he is not being candid.

Scott is, I maintained, "lying or stupid." Unfortunately, there is another alternative: he may have been telling the truth. And that probably would be the worst of all.

Veteran conservative syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, blasting Scott's "critics on the left," wrote

As a child growing up in South Carolina, Scott was often angry in school, he said, and nearly failed. That he didn’t is a credit to his single mother, who “has prayed me through some really tough times,” and his grandparents with whom, he, his mother and his brother lived. He spoke of seeing his grandfather read the morning paper each day, only to learn much later that his grandfather couldn’t read but was trying to set an example.

In other words, Scott’s is the kind of story Americans have always admired — the overcoming of adversity to become what he could not have imagined as a child.

Because it "is the kind of story Americans have always admired," it's the kind of story thousands of politicians have told throughout history.  The dates, the geography, the ethnicity change but the essentials remain the same: I really had it hard but I rose above it, and above everyone else. Young Tim did it because, prompted by the prayers of a single mother,  God blessed him. You, most Americans, have not so blessed.

If Scott had two strikes against him, got on base, and ultimately scored the winning run (became one of only 100 US Senators), good for him. But it's not good when he fails to acknowledge that in these United States of America, runs usually are scored by people who, through advantages accumulating from birth, start out at third base. Most of the others fail to get beyond first base. (Perhaps their mother didn't pray hard enough; it certainly couldn't be because they haven't been given a helping hand.)

Parker argued

The trouble among people who seem to see racism everywhere is that Scott neither sees nor dwells in a Black-and-White world. Life for Scott hasn’t been easy. As he said Wednesday, he has experienced the insults to his dignity that other minorities recognize as part and parcel of life in America. He’s been followed in stores, he said, and pulled over for no reason while driving.

Parker omitted "I get called “Uncle Tom” and the N-word — by ‘progressives’!" The tense, in which Scott stated "I get called" rather than "I previously was called," is crucial. The columnist added

So, what’s wrong with Tim Scott? Not one thing except that he’s a conservative — and Black. A child could easily recognize the unfairness of such an assessment. Anyone can see that judging Scott by his skin color is the essence of racism. The fact that Republicans admire him does not and should not diminish his accomplishments.

Well now, "anyone can see that judging Scott by his skin color is the essence of racism" is rather ironic coming from the pen (or keystroke) of one ardently defending Scott.  It may have escaped Parker's attention that the subject of her admiration himself seems not to attribute it to racism.  "Hear me clearly," Scott said, "America is not a racist country."

Hearing this, I pointed out the other day that assuming these reprehensible things happened- and are still happening, in his telling- to a respected, middle-aged pillar of the community, the only reasonable conclusion is that America is a racist country. If in light of being treated as a second-class citizen (and maybe as subhuman), Scott concludes his country is not racist, he is being dishonest or stupid.

However, there is a third possibility. Perhaps the Senator does believe that America, with a history of slavery, discrimination, and voter suppression (that, also in the present), is not a racist country. He may simultaneously assert that he is the victim of bias executed by police officers; bias practiced by store clerks, managers, and/or owners; and bias by acquaintances and/or strangers resorting to use of a racial slur 

Do you see what Scott is doing here?  Presumably, he believes the prejudice he has encountered from numerous individuals is vile.The country and its institutions should not be perceived as racist; the people of America should be. If the old red, white, and blue is as, the Senator maintains, "the greatest country on earth" while all the rest is happening to people simply on the basis of the color of their skin, the problem is not institutional or structural; it's people.

So were I ever to meet Tim Scott, I would have to confess. I should not have assumed that he is a liar or a stupid man. He may be neither, just someone who loves and reveres this country as the greatest but has only distaste for those of us living here.

 

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Thank Goodness, No Deplorables

One of these has been proven wrong and one was right. Can you guess which one is which?

In her column in The Washington Post on November 4, 2016, Kathleen Parker wrote

If Trump wins, he’ll be held more or less in check by the House and Senate because that’s the way our system of government is set up. Not even Republicans are eager to follow Trump’s lead....

The same, alas, can be said about both Clinton and Trump. Whatever they’ve projected or promised won’t be reflected in the reality of the presidency. It never is. Whatever they may wish to be, the president is only one-third of the equation — granted, with an armed force.

On a happier note, either way — cue Gloria Gaynor — oh, yes, we will survive.

Eight weeks earlier, another woman had commented

I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think well he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

Virtually no one stood up to agree with Hillary Clinton. Either folks didn't agree with her or, well, it's Hillary and you know those emails. Right?

Clinton wasn't completely accurate- she did make up the word "generalistic." However, after the events of January 6 in the nation's capital, this appears particularly prescient:

.... there’s so much more than I find deplorable in his campaign: the way that he cozies up to white supremacist, makes racist attacks, calls women pigs, mocks people with disabilities — you can’t make this up. He wants to round up and deport 16 million people, calls our military a disaster. And every day he says something else which I find so personally offensive, but also dangerous.

In the four years since, many people had found offensive Donald Trump, his actions and his words- but particularly his words, because that's where we are.  The culture of outrage focuses nowadays far less on behavior than on the spoken word, sometimes even from 15-year-old private citizens.

The multitudes of protesters- all were protesters, a significant minority something much worse- gathered at the US Capitol yesterday aren't all deplorable.  A few do not suffer from the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or Islamaphobic attitudes toward which Clinton pointed.

But many of them do, and they were present at the Capitol to protest a free and fair election and to support someone openly racist, sexist, xenophobic, and Islamaphobic. (He deserves a pass on the homophobic, for all we know.)  And make no mistake about it: most of these folks are not stupid. When they tell pollsters that the election wasn't fairly held, they do not necessarily believe the election was rigged. Their response is a proxy for their support (and love) for Donald Trump and firm conviction that too many people dangerously erred and harmed their country by not giving him another chance to make America great again.

"Let's call Trump. He'll be happy. We're fighting for Trump." then continues, "We need to get our boy Donald J. Trump into office."pic.twitter.com/WIy0sUwKIO

— Cleavon MD (@Cleavon_MD) January 7, 2021

A side, but analogous, note: when a pollster once asked me whether I approved or disapproved of President Barack Obama, I asked her if there were a follow-up question in which I could indicate my reasoning. She said there was not, and thus I noted approval of an insufficiently bold President because disapproval inevitably would be cited as opposition to a Democrat routinely denounced as a dictatorial liberal.

Deplorable acts are committed by deplorable people. After many years as a reality show host (successfully) building a radically false image of himself, Donald J. Trump now has spent five years telling us who and what he is.  And so a tremendous number of people protested in Washington to overturn a democratic election in which voters decided to turn the guy out of office.

Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic or whatever, they consciously made a decision. "Deplorable" seems pretty mild now and the many wise men (and women) who reviled the candidate who warned us over four years ago about her opponent should concede error. Perhaps they would, too, but you know, it was Hillary.

 

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Not Stupid, But....

Kathleen Parker is onto something. Just not as much as she thinks she is.

The veteran syndicated columnist, no longer entangled with Elliot Spitzer at CNN, recently criticized

Democrats who pride themselves these days on being members of the "smart" party. Indeed, the Ivies do seem to be mass-producing Democrats, including the last two Democratic presidents. And, alas, even the most recent Republican president, though he seems not to have taken it, or himself, quite so seriously.

She concedes

Republicans have earned some of the ridicule aimed their way. Many are willing to dumb themselves down to win the support of the party's base, preferring to make fun of evolution and global warming rather than take the harder route of explaining, for example, that a "theory" when applied to evolution has a specific scientific meaning. It isn't just some random idea cooked up in a frat house.

Parker obviously recognizes that many Democrats are convinced that many of the extreme, unsubstantiated views apparently held by many conservative Republicans emanate from stupidity- or a kind of mental illness, though she doesn't specifically address that theory. In his controversial CNN online piece urging President Obama to panic, James Carville exclaimed "As I watch the Republican debates, I realize that we are on the brink of a crazy person running our nation."

Parker realizes it's not craziness or stupidity. She notes "anyone who thinks Republicans are stupid is missing the point. What those dummies Bush and Perry have in common, other than having been Teas governors, pilots and cheerleaders (what is it with Texas?), is that they're not stupid at all." Instead, she credits them with a sort of nobless oblige charm- "smart enough to know that most people in this country didn't go to Ivy League colleges- or any college for that matter" and "haven't led privileged lives of any sort."

But Bush graduated from an Ivy League college- and Perry graduated college with a Bachelor's Degree in animal science. Sure, it wasn't climate science but presumably the Texas governor knows a little something about the physical world around us. Nonetheless, in his book, the Texas governor had labeled global warming theory "a contrived mess" with "doctored data" and claimed "we are experiencing a cooling trend." And he has told New Hampshire voters "I think we're seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man made global warming is what is causing the climate to change."

It's hard to believe that Perry is that stupid (or even ignorant)- and as Parker understands, he's not. In last month's GOP debate, Perry contended President Obama "had $800 billion worth of stimulus in the first round of stimulus. It created zero jobs."

We now have an intelligent man- Kathleen Parker believes so and she is right- telling us that the earth is cooling and $800 billion pumped into an economy created zero jobs, while every estimate has pegged that money as having produced jobs in the (low) seven-figures.

And Perry knows that intimately. The Texas Tribune reported in August "Through the second quarter of this year, Texas has used $17.4 billion in federal stimulus money- including $8 billion of the one-time dollars to fund state expenses that recur over and year. In fact, Texas used the federal stimulus to balance its last two budgets."

Texas, like 48 other states, legally must balance its operating budget annually. If it hadn't gotten that money, other spending would have had to be cut, prompting major job losses. And the state's governor says "it created zero jobs."

Rick Perry isn't alone in his tendencies; he has company in George W. Bush and some other Republicans. But Perry is reputed to be his party's leading candidate to be President of the United States. Meanwhile, he vociferously denies global warming and adamantly maintains that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which supplied him with over $17 billion dollars, nowhere created a job. No, Rick Perry isn't stupid and he doesn't believe what he has been saying. Which makes him something worse than stupid.

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Non-Partisan Hysteria

We interrupt our regularly scheduled discourse to bring you this special message from Planet Broder:

But nonetheless, suppose that he is serious when he says, over and over, as he did on Thanksgiving Day, that if we want to "accelerate this recovery" and attack the backlog of lost jobs, "we won't do it as any one political party. We've got to do it as one people...."

Suppose there is a chance that he is serious - that after two years of trying to govern through one party, a party that held commanding majorities in the House and Senate but now has lost them, two years with landmark accomplishments but ultimate frustration of his hopes to change Washington, he has reverted to his original philosophy of governing.

No supposing about it- after two years of negotiating- nay, pleading- with a party which fought to create a Waterloo for what it termed "Obamacare," opposed a modest, conservative stimulus program designed to reverse a near-Depression, dutifully opposed tepid Wall Street reform, and voted even against a small business program, the President remains serious about bipartisanship. Naive and foolish, but conciliatory and bi-partisan.

Broder is only arguably the most famous and oldest of the Washington insiders who (apparently) believe that if only both parties compromised, the heavens will open and there will be eternal bliss.

We've always assumed these guys and gals were selling a load of nonsense- but maybe they're victims as much as perpetrators.

And so it is with syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, one half of CNN's still-fairly new Parker-Spitzer. She lauds the new group "No Labels" which, the Wall Street Journal reports

has drawn support from supporters and advisers of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the country's most powerful independent politician (and) is led by Democratic fund-raiser Nancy Jacobson and Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, who were introduced to each other by Kevin Sheekey, Mr. Bloomberg's political adviser....

The group has raised more than $1 million to seed its effort against what it calls "hyper-partisanship."

Parker argues "Democrats and moderate Republicans alike have been banished," even "purged," and have joined the No Labels movement. She notes that Jun Choi, the Democratic mayor of Edison, N.J., "told The Wall Street Journal he lost because he wasn't extreme enough. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire state senator, thinks she lost for being too moderate." According to the WSJ, at the group's recent gathering in Portsmouth, N.H., Mayor Choi volunteered "Hi, I'm Jun Choi, and I lost because I wasn't extreme enough." He was followed by Hassan, the state senator, who, evidently mistaking the gathering for an A.A. meeting, added ""Hi, I'm Maggie Hassan, and was defeated because I was too moderate."

Choi's Edison, N.J., a large, moderately affluent suburb, had been ruled since prehistoric times by a Democratic machine which, a few years ago, Choi challenged successfully in a Democratic primary. His recent primary defeat, therefore, may be disheartening- but it doesn't appear to have been related to Persian Gulf policy, extension of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, Wall Street reform, or even education policy. According to NJ.com

Two-term Councilwoman Antonia Ricigliano, who had the backing of the township's Democratic Committee as well as the local police union, snatched the party's nomination for mayor away from incumbent Jun Choi tonight in an upset primary election victory....

Ricigliano's win is the culmination of a stinging, dramatic campaign that saw nasty allegations, protests outside town hall and hordes of finger-pointing fliers passed around Edison, making it the most heated primary in Middlesex County.

And then, given the politics of the area, came the key comment:

She also received the backing of the Edison police and fire unions, who viciously opposed Choi.

It may have served Choi well to have appeared at a No Labels convention to claim that he was the victim of liberalism run amok, and it sent a tingle up Parker's leg. But it doesn't square with reality and whatever virtue the victorious opponent may lack, her victory, spurred by the support of the representatives of police officers and firefighters, does not reek of a party consumed by leftist elitist intellectuals out of touch with the enlightened middle.

But facts may not matter. If President Obama has not been able to reverse the economic downturn, end partisan sniping in Washington, and prevent his party from experiencing a "shellacking" from voters dismayed by his leadership, it must be because he has been too liberal and has failed to reach out to Republicans. Taylor Marsh, however, notes

Since Barack Obama came into office he has unilaterally disarmed in the name of bipartisanship and “accomplishments,” without taking the time to make the Democratic case for policy prescriptions that matter in people’s lives and has been the foundation of the Democratic Party since Roosevelt. There can be only one reason for this and that is he doesn’t believe in them strongly enough. Pres. Obama even went so far as to voluntarily form a Debt Commission through Executive Order, which he wouldn’t do on DADT, to take on entitlements when they’re not the problem, while also sending signals that he’d protect the upper 2% Bush tax cuts even as Warren Buffet and other wealthy Americans served up protestations to the President’s ridiculous ode to the super rich.

Compromise does not consist of one side staking out an extreme position and the other side doing whatever it can to accomodate it. A recent Gallup poll found that most Democrats want office holders to compromise while most Republicans want those officials to stick to their beliefs. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal found three prominent politicians planning to attend the upcoming launch of No Labels: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and United States senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. You will not be surprised that they are all Democrats- like President Obama, exhorting, imploring, beseeching Republicans and others to be reasonable, pretty please.

Broder, Parker, and other Washington Wise Men are impressed. Voters, unable to detect a commitment to principle but sensing weakness, are far less so.

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