Jay Smooth: "Phony" (A Song for Mitt Romney)

from ill-Doctrine:

After Jay-Z recorded "Glory" to welcome his new daughter into the world, I wondered what it would sound like if Republican voters made a song to welcome Mitt Romney as their now-inevitable nominee.

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"Phony" featuring W.M.R.
LYRICS:

Can't explain how uninspired i feel
Looking at this primary field
Mitt romney, I freaking hate you
I can't believe the nomination is you
You're phony.

False promises, false starts
Six different frontrunners falling apart
Now look who we're stuck with
The million dollar Tin Man with no heart.
One percenters, you dance for them
Then you switch up your stance for them
You're phony...

You are amazing, you're unbelievable
I mean literally, Icannot believe in you
Just an empty suit, who's really in control?
There's nothing in your soul except opinion polls
The fakest in a room full of fake actors
You've never paid dues, you barely pay taxes
And every time you speak it makes me hate you more and
It's not cuz your faith is Mormon it's cuz your so fake and boring.
You're boring. And Phony. So phony.
boring boring bo

You're phony it's never been disputable
You look phony in every interview you do
You look phony at weddings and at funerals
You even look phony singing America the Beautiful

You're the child of a party's legacy
Now you're the child that made that party dead to me.
You're a smarmy dog-torturing fake moderate turned fake conservative
What a terrible recipe.

Whistling Dixie (the remix): The Southern Strategy in the Age of Color-Blind Racism

Whistling Dixie (the remix): 

The Southern Strategy in the Age of Color-Blind Racism

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

In recent weeks, with the GOP establishment coming to the aid of Mitt Romney and because of Newt Ginrich’s efforts to sell himself as an outsider, an increasingly visible narrative has emerged: as the anti-GOP establishment.  Given Newt’s racial politics and his entire campaign strategy, it is hard to think of Newt as anything but the GOP establishment.

At the same time, there has been a growing sentiment about the hegemony of colorblind racism within the GOP.  “Colorblind racism is the new normal in American conservative political thought,” writes Edward Wyckoff Williams.  The “2012 Republican candidates are using egregious signals and dog whistles to incite racial divisiveness as an effective tool for political gain. But when confronted about the nature of their offensive rhetoric, the answer is either an innocuous denial or dismissive retort.”   The codes or dog whistle politics are not new, nor is the denial.  While the audacity of race denial may be on the rise, the clarity of the GOP’s race politics have been on full display.  No secret decoder is necessary especially as we look at the larger history of race and the GOP. 

Like so many of his fellow competitors, Newt’s racial demagoguery, his demonization of people of color, and his efforts to scapegoat have been a daily reality during the 2011-2012 GOP presidential primary. This is nothing new from Newt, who has made his career on the demonization of “welfare moms,”  “illegals” and a “food stamp president.”  In 2007, Newt took exception with bilingual education, announcing: “We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.” 

This has continued during the current election cycle with his recycling of the Moynihan report and his policy initiatives focusing on teaching black kids a work ethic.   The language, the policies, and the centrality of race illustrate the profound ways that Newt Gingrich is the GOP establishment.  As the voice box for the racial ideologies and the torchbearer for the GOP’s southern strategy (demonizing people of color in hopes of galvanizing white voters to support a party that doesn’t represent their economic interests), Newt’s denied GOP credentials is almost laughable. 

This is the party of Nixon, whose southern strategy sought to scapegoat African Americans.  This is the same man, who talked about “Negro bastards" who "live like a bunch of dogs" on welfare rolls.  This is the GOP that was led by Richard Nixon, who one said:

Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it's a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he's been in New York," Nixon said. "He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.' So forth and so on.

My own view is I think he's right if you're talking in terms of 500 years," he said. "I think it's wrong if you're talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that's the only thing that's going to do it, Rose.

This is the party of Reagan, who described outrage from working Americans over the sight of a “strapping young buck using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store.”  When not demonizing black men, he spoke about “welfare queens” in Chicago, “who drove a Cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards and four fictional dead husband.”  This is the same Reagan, who started his presidential campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi with an “ode to state’s rights,” a theme that continued with his defense of segregationist Bob Jones University and his denunciation of the voting right act as "humiliating to the South."  As the patriarch of the party, it is no wonder that racist rhetoric and appeals are central to the 2012 campaign.  

This the party who used Willie Horton, who the Bush campaign portrayed as a dangerous super-predator, lurking in dark alleys, ready to kill and rape.  This is the party of Trent Lott, who at the birthday party of segregationist Strom Thurmond announced, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

This is the party that brought us Barbara Bush, who after Hurricane Katrina, announced:

Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston...What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them.

This is the party that has used ACORN, Jeremiah Wright, and blamed minority homeowners for the recession.  It is the party that popularized Barack Hussein Obama and used “pallin round” with terrorists with great frequency. 

This is the party of Rick Santorum, who routinely demonizes Islam, who has called for a “long war” with Muslims: “What must we do to win [against Islam]? We must educate, engage, evangelize and eradicate.”   This is the party of scapegoating “illegal immigrants,” the criminalblack man, the Arab terrorist; it is the party of fear and division, and one that is “addicted” to race-baiting.

Newt’s campaign, his constant deployment of racial codes, his demonization of communities of color, and efforts to mobilize white voters is representative of the GOP.  The frames, daily rhetoric of racism and demonization, which has been central to Republican politics for the last 40 years, is in fact the basis of his campaign. If it walks like an elephant, talks like an elephant, demonizes like an elephant, and stomps all over other people like an elephant, well he must be an elephant.

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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackManand blogs @ No Tsuris.

Kevin Alexander Gray Talks Race & the Southern Strategy on Democracy Now

democracynow.org

Leading up to the South Carolina primary, several Republican presidential candidates have been criticized for comments made over issues of race. This week Newt Gingrich defended his description of President Obama as "the food stamp president," while offering praise for President Andrew Jackson, the architect of the Indian Removal Act. We speak to South Carolina civil rights activist Kevin Alexander Gray and longtime political reporter Wayne Slater about how Republicans have adopted the long-held "Southern Strategy" of race-baiting in order to win over bigoted white voters. "When the Democrats come here, they come to get their black ticket punched. Republicans come here to punch black people," Gray says.

"None of These Guys Are Main Street Guys"--James Braxton Peterson on Herman Cain

Dr. James Braxton Peterson, Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University, discusses the candidacy of Herman Cain on The Ed Show  

James Braxton Peterson Weighs in on Latest GOP Debate

Herman Cain claims he can make it simple, save the economy, and he's not letting facts get in the way. Ed Schultz gets reaction from tonight's GOP debate from writer Jim Moore, Lehigh University's Dr. James Peterson, and MSNBC political analyst Joe Watkins.

William Jelani Cobb: "The GOP’s Cynical Embrace of Herman Cain"

The GOP’s cynical embrace of Herman Cain

by William Jelani Cobb | Washington Post

Some weeks ago, as I was conducting research for a book on anti-communism, I happened upon a political ad for the 1952 presidential election. The ad was notable for two reasons: It appeared in an African American newspaper, and it said in bold letters, “Let’s face it — a vote for the Democrats is a vote for Jim Crow.” This was followed by an explanation of why blacks should support the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket.

In 1952 the Democratic Party suffered from a kind of split-personality disorder, vying for votes among Northern blacks who favored desegregation and Southern whites who strongly opposed it. Its presidential ticket reflected that tension, pairing the liberal Adlai Stevenson with Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama, whose record of opposition to civil rights was well known (and listed in the GOP ad for any who might have forgotten it). 

The ad was a cynical ma­nipu­la­tion — Eisenhower was no civil rights advocate — but that’s nearly beside the point. What is most notable is that the Republican Party was sincere in its cynicism. This was a bona fide effort, if not to win over black voters, then to at least dampen their enthusiasm for the Democrats. It’s a stark contrast to the Grand Old Party’s current non-approach to African American voters. And this makes Herman Cain’s recent surge in the GOP polls all the more notable. 

Cain’s poll numbers are improving, he finished first in a Florida straw poll, and he seems to be an early front-runner in a handful of states that will hold primaries after the nominee has probably been already decided. But the most telling element of this rise is what his candidacy says — or doesn’t say — about the state of race in this country. 

Three years ago, Barack Obama’s emergence as the front-runner in the Democratic primaries was widely understood as a barometer for race in the United States. His election spawned furious speculation that we had become a “post-racial” society. Yet his approach to governing highlights the ways in which these ideas were premature, or at least far more complicated than was generally acknowledged at the zenith of Obamamania. 

The administration has been loath to address race directly, leading to tensions with some African Americans who think the president is either less willing or less able to address our specific needs than a white Democrat would be. Thus it became easy to believe that the white liberals who voted for Obama did so, in part, as a means of achieving cheap absolution for the nation’s racial sins. 

That Cain’s campaign is so studiously scrubbed free of race is a commentary on the very racialization he eschews. His Web site features his stances on immigration, national security, taxation, energy and health care. There is no reference to civil rights concerns, disproportionate incarceration or what is, at this point, a racialized unemployment crisis. This is curious only because, unlike the other Republican candidates, Cain believes that he can win a solid third of the black vote. Late last month he said blacks have been “brainwashed” into voting for Democrats (always a smart move to insult the intelligence of people whose votes you’re seeking). But it would require a specific kind of brainwashing — the doctrine that epidermal allegiance should trump actual political interests — for Cain to win a third of an electorate whose key issues don’t even crack the top 10 on his Web site. 

There are 40 million African Americans in this country. We are as diverse as any group of citizens. And we certainly have a stake in the issues of energy, security and health care. But electorates are selfish, and realistically, a candidate who doesn’t engage the specific interests of a group, however they’re defined, doesn’t usually win much of that group’s support. This is, significantly, the most frustrating aspect of Obama’s attempts to placate African Americans by highlighting what he has done for the country at large. The irony, of course, is that Obama is most likely wary of addressing black issues head-on because of the criticism he would receive from the kinds of white voters who are increasingly supporting Cain.

In any case, it became clear that something more than “brainwashing” was at play in recent days when Texas Gov. Rick Perry provided Cain with his own Jeremiah Wright moment — a point when race unavoidably injects itself into an otherwise raceless campaign. Recognizing the damning implications of applying the most radioactive epithet in the language to, of all things, a hunting camp, Perry’s campaign quickly denounced the word and insisted that the candidate had done all he could to literally whitewash the camp’s name with a coat of paint. Cain, a man who lived through segregation, made a milquetoast muttering about it being “insensitive,” but even that understatement was enough to provoke a riotous response among his supporters. 

Indignant conservatives took to blogs and online discussions, denouncing Cain for “playing the race card” (while we’re on the subject of banned language, that cliche should’ve been outlawed long ago) and, unbelievably, defending Perry’s sign as not racist.

All this suggests that another, more curious kind of absolution is at work on the right this election season. It’s not one in which the country’s racial sins are forgiven, but one where blacks seek absolution for ever suspecting that there had been sins in the first place. At least that’s what it appeared to be when Cain played down his comments — the insensitivity of calling a slur insensitive.

At its most cynical, Cain’s campaign doesn’t offer redemption for the party associated with the Willie Horton ads, the terms “welfare queen” and “high-tech lynching,” and now “Niggerhead” so much as it suggests that there was never anything to be redeemed. Cain himself joined this mad parade of racial non-bigotry months earlier, saying he would ban Muslims from his Cabinet, or at least force them to sign special loyalty oaths. How can that be bigotry? A black guy said it.

The racial insurance policy that Cain’s candidacy offers to tea party conservatives who have been criticized as bigoted by some quarters is certainly not the entirety of his appeal. Nor was absolution the majority of Obama’s appeal to whites in 2008. But it is certainly part of it, and it works in the way that race most commonly does in this era, in subtle, inscrutable ways, maddeningly opaque, the exact extent of its influence difficult to determine. 

Thus Cain’s ascent in the polls presents us with the tantalizing prospect, no matter how unlikely, that our next election will feature two African American men, neither of them post-racial but both somehow committed to publicly behaving as if we are. Cynicism, not racism, is now our foremost national sin. I plan to print up T-shirts reading “Election 2012: Vote for the Black Guy.” I expect to make a mint.

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William Jelani Cobb is the author of “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress” and an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Rutgers University.