JEFFREY LORD: SCARLETT O’HARA RUNS FOR PRESIDENT ****
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/15/scarlett-ohara-runs-for-presid
“Anyone who says racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention.” — Hillary Clinton to the American Bar Association
“Hillary cannot have black women’s allegiance for free. Black women will not be relegated to the status of supportive Mammy, easing the way for privileged white women to enter the halls of power.” — Melissa Harris-Perry in the Root
There she goes again.
Hillary Clinton is playing the race card.
Surprise, surprise.
Another episode in America’s favorite soap opera: Scarlett O’Hara runs for president.
It’s not the first time, either. This is the game of what we call in this space “The Formula.” Used first, last, always and through eternity by the “Skin Color Liberals” — which is to say those who use race to gain power, build Big Government, then repeat. Again…and again… and again and again and again.
Skin Color Liberalism is the foundation of the Democratic Party. The foundation of Progressivism. Simply put, no playing the race card — no election victories. No Big Government.
We’ll come back to this in a moment, but first — Hillary.
It was 2008. And MSNBC’s Obama-supporting Chris Matthews was furious with Hillary Clinton.
As detailed over at Newsbusters in real time, the subject of the moment was Clinton’s then-famous ad that depicted a sleeping child safe and sound while at the White House the phone rings: a crisis is at hand. The point of the ad, said the Clinton people, was that the steady, experienced hand of the President picking up that phone — and protecting the safety and security of that sleeping child — could only belong to then-Senator Hillary Clinton. As opposed to that of her young and callow opponent, Senator Barack Obama. (As it turned out of course, the 3:00 a.m. moment eventually did come — in Benghazi. With both Obama and Secretary of State Clinton being asleep at the switch. Another story, another time.)
Matthews was furious, and promptly cited this angry response to the Clinton ad from Harvard Professor of Sociology Orlando Patterson — a black man — who wrote the following of Clinton’s ad in the New York Times:
I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery … and when I saw the Clinton ads, the central image, innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger, it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad, as I see it, is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.
Well.
Matthews wasn’t finished, either. He flatly declared the ad to be “racist.” Then added: “It’s dog whistle time.”
Matthews was far from alone in accusing Hillary of racism. And the Clinton ad that so infuriated both Matthews and Professor Patterson wasn’t the only time the charge of racism was raised against Hillary Clinton.
There was this moment, as recorded over at USA Today where Clinton gave an interview that was reported as follows:
Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
The cries of racism were instant. In a blistering article over at The Root the black leftist and now-MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris-Perry titled her piece Hillary’s “Scarlett O’Hara Act.” The article ran replete with a picture from the famous Gone With the Wind film with actresses Vivian Leigh and Hattie McDaniel in their respective roles as O’Hara and “Mammy,” the O’Hara housekeeper. Wrote Harris-Perry:
Sister voters have a beef with white women like Clinton that is both racial and gendered. It is not about choosing race; it is about rejecting Hillary’s Scarlett O’Hara act.
Black women voters are rejecting Hillary Clinton because her ascendance is not a liberating symbol. Her tears are not moving. Her voice does not resonate. Throughout history, privileged white women, attached at the hip to their husband’s power and influence, have been complicit in black women’s oppression. Many African American women are simply refusing to play Mammy to Hillary.
Ouch.
As the Obama-Clinton duel heated up there was this over at Politico:
Racial tensions roil Democratic race
A series of comments from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, her husband and her supporters are spurring a racial backlash and adding a divisive edge to the presidential primary as the candidates head south to heavily African-American South Carolina.
The comments, which ranged from the New York senator appearing to diminish the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement — an aide later
said she misspoke — to Bill Clinton dismissing Sen. Barack Obama’s image in the media as a “fairy tale” — generated outrage on black radio, black blogs and cable television. And now they’ve drawn the attention of prominent African-American politicians.
“A cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements,” said Obama spokeswoman Candice Tolliver, who said that Clinton would have to decide whether she owed anyone an apology.
Then there was Hillary’s Bill. The former President, who began his Washington career working for the notorious segregationist and “Southern Manifesto” signer Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright angrily felt forced to tell ABC’s Good Morning America: “I am not a racist.”
There was more — plenty of more.
So now that Hillary Clinton has gone to the American Bar Association and yet again played the race card — this time roiling racial the waters over Voter ID and the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the Voting Rights Act, the question of Hillary’s racism stirs again.
James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal wrote up Clinton’s ABA speech this way:
[Mrs.] Clinton denounced the Supreme Court’s invalidation of pre-clearance requirements in the Voting Rights Act, which require jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to clear voting law changes with the federal government.
“Some take the historic success of the Voting Rights Act as a sign that discrimination is a thing of the past,” [Mrs.] Clinton said. “By invalidating pre-clearance, the Supreme Court has shifted the burden back onto citizens facing discrimination and those lawyers willing to stand with them.”
And she condemned efforts to tighten voting requirements in several states including Florida, Texas and North Carolina, whose voting rights law she dubbed “the greatest hits of voter suppression.”
“Anyone who says racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention,” [Mrs.] Clinton said.
In other words, Hillary Clinton — and she is far from alone in liberal land — is stirring the race waters for the umpteenth-endless time eternal to get votes and gain power. Which she will, if elected, use as all liberals do. To continue right on building the Power of the State.
There can be no end to the issue of race, period. Because without it — without slavery or segregation or lynching or the Klan or racial quotas or voter ID or illegal immigration — to make the sale, liberalism — progressivism — could not and cannot survive.
Which brings us once again to The Formula. The Formula that is Skin Color Liberalism.
The Formula that Hillary Clinton trotted out this week to, of all places, the American Bar Association.
How does The Formula Work? Like this.
Americans are well familiar with the Federal Reserve. It’s safe to say that in all the endless debates that rage around the Fed — how much money is being printed, the performance of this or that Fed chairman, should we use QE 3 to buy up mortgage backed securities or, if you are Ron Paul, whether the Fed should exist at all — no one ever stops to think: how did the Federal Reserve come to be at all in the first place?
The answer? Skin Color Liberalism. The Formula.
Once upon a time in America there was a man named Carter Glass. Carter Glass was a newspaper publisher from Lynchburg, Virginia who leveraged his paper to get into politics. Specifically, Glass — a progressive Democrat and a fervent racist — won a seat in the State Senate and then helped rewrite the Virginia Constitution in 1902. Glass used race as a tool to get himself elected and to stay elected. When it came time to rewrite the Virginia Constitution, Glass was most proud of his successful effort to install both a literacy test and a poll tax in the constitution, specifically targeting black voters. Asked if what he was doing wasn’t discrimination Glass happily replied:
“Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose. To remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”
On the strength of such sentiments, tied tightly to the Progressive cause, Carter Glass went on to Congress. Playing the race card with regularity, Glass was repeatedly returned to Congress where he eventually became the chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee. And in 1913, with the arrival of his fellow segregationist and racist Virginian friend Woodrow Wilson’s election to the White House, Carter Glass set about his grandest political achievement — creating the Federal Reserve. Wilson was so pleased with Glass’s performance that he eventually made him Secretary of the Treasury. A Cabinet job that Glass parlayed into a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he wrote the Glass-Steagall Banking Act — Glass-Steagall no small source of controversy in the 2008 financial crisis.
In other words, Mr. Glass used his starkly racist views to fuel his entire Progressive political career so that he could not only re-write the Virginia Constitution but change the entire financial system of the United States.
It was The Formula — Skin Color Liberalism at work.
Amidst all the dust-ups surrounding Michelle Obama’s low-cal school lunches, no one recalls how the federal school lunch program came to be in the first place.
That’s right. The program is inextricably tied to the racist U.S. Senator from Georgia — the progressive/New Deal supporting Richard B. Russell.
Like Carter Glass, Russell made his career using The Formula — tying race to liberalism. Elected Georgia Governor in 1930 at 33, he was sworn in by his father, the Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court Richard B. Russell Sr. The Chief Justice was a friend and ally of — yes indeed — the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly thereafter, young Governor Russell was Senator Russell, a job he would hold until his death in 1971, playing the race card repeatedly throughout.
Russell’s contribution using The Formula of Skin Color Liberalism? You got it. It was the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act of 1946. Which is to say, using race — the Klan and segregation specifically — to first help create and then maintain his career as governor and U.S. Senator, Russell then used his power to create what is, with 2007 figures, an $8.7 billion federal bureaucracy. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, there are 1,387 employees spread across the country. These federal employees are represented by two liberal unions, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). Both of which give over 90% of union campaign contributions to — Democrats.
Thus, the Skin Color Liberal game. The Formula at work.
While both Carter Glass and Richard Russell, like Hillary Clinton, are white, The Formula is used across the board by liberals of all colors.
Recently Rush Limbaugh called attention to Devil’s Night: And Other True Tails of Detroit by Ze’ev Chafets. The book tells the tale of the black Detroit Mayor Coleman Young — and though written in 1990, what Chafets is describing is Coleman’s use of The Formula. Skin Color Liberalism. The Formula is at the root of the political career of Washington, D.C.’s ex-mayor and current city councilman Marion Barry. As recorded by Breitbart News, here is Barry using The Formula just last year, appealing to black Washingtonians playing the race card this way:
“We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops. They ought to go … and we need African-Americans to take their place.”
Both the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus are infamous for this use of The Formula. On a recent Hannity special on race, Star Parker — a black conservative — described The Formula this way:
“When we look at who’s behind this strategy, the Liberal democrats have not changed their M.O. This is not a new strategy. They used it during slavery. Remember, every time the word freedom was mentioned, and African-Americans at that time heard about freedom , if you ran away they would bring you back to that plantation — the Overseer. The Overseer today is the Congressional Black Caucus . Their exclusive job is to keep them on the plantation, keep them uneducated and keep them unarmed. And this was the same job of the Overseer of the slave plantation which was liberal Democrats…they would take that slave… they would strip the skin off of him and make everybody watch…. And that’s what they do to us.”
As one watched MSNBC’s Al Sharpton assemble his forces to march on Trayvon Martin — demanding that Florida end its Stand Your Ground law — The Formula was at work.
Recall the dust-up over Shirley Sherrod? The video that everyone said was wrongly edited by the late Andrew Breitbart? Watch the whole video, demanded Sherrod’s angry supporters. Done. What was discovered? Standing in front of a local NAACP group in Georgia, the complete tape showed Sherrod using….that’s right…The Formula. Said she:
There are jobs at USDA, and many times there are no people of color to fill those jobs ‘cause we shy away from agriculture. We hear the word “agriculture” and think only of working in the fields.
And you’ve heard of a lot of layoffs. Have you heard of anybody in the federal government losing their job? That’s all that I need to say, okay?”
You know, I haven’t seen such a mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of health care. Some of the racism we thought was buried. Didn’t it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bush’s and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.
Without a hint of irony, there was the black Georgian Sherrod playing the exact same game on a small scale that the white Georgian Richard Russell played on a state and national scale. The game of Skin Color Liberals. Play the race card in the cause of Big Government — in this case selling not only the idea of Big Government jobs at USDA but Obamacare as well. (Sherrod also played the class warfare card, again another story, another time.)
So too, of course, are left-wing Hispanics playing the Skin Color Liberal game.
Why, pray tell, was the Obama Administration filing a lawsuit against Arizona over immigration? With all manner of Hispanic interest groups leaping into the fray to lead protests and demonstrations? Why do groups like La Raza or LULAC (League of United Latin America Citizens) play the race card — and then support ObamaCare?
They are using The Formula.
Play the race card, get elected, grow the government. Skin Color Liberalism.
This is the formula that created the century long, white-dominated “Solid South” for Democrats, with whites voting in overwhelming numbers for progressive Democrats like Carter Glass. The Formula is used by the Left today to get the same results: 90-plus percent of the black vote routinely goes to today’s progressives. The next target? Polarizing Hispanics politically in the same racist fashion once used by slave-owners, segregationists, and Klansmen.
Now comes Hillary Clinton — again — playing The Formula card to win the presidency. And the only reason she isn’t finishing her second term in the White House right now is that in 2008 she came up against a candidate — Barack Obama — who was better at playing The Formula card then she was.
From slavery to today’s illegal immigration and Voter ID the principle is the same. Pick up on the race issue and run with it. Then create — a partial list — the Federal Reserve, the school lunch program, Social Security, the minimum wage, or Obamacare.
Whatever Statist delight delights.
But always begin by following the instruction on The Formula box: Add race and mix well.
This week, Hillary Clinton stepped to the podium of the American Bar Association and summoned The Formula.
To play again the eternal game of The Skin Color Liberal.
And what happened?
White and black, brown and yellow and red, male and female, straight and gay, one by one the Mammy’s of the ABA rose to their feet and cheered.
Scarlett O’Hara runs again!
Photo: UPI
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