SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2016

Today’s Good News And Bad News

From Our Local Political Junkie We’ll Call “Cincy Dave”

 

RACE WAR

Today, it’s bad news for everyone.   The presidential race has become about race and is a race to the bottom.  This is beginning to be the real mudslinging that lots of people had expected.  Hillary pointed out in an ad that Trump has surrounded himself with white supremacists, then he shot back by calling her a bigot.  Later, he tweeted that a KKK member was Hillary’s mentor, referring to the late Sen. Robert Byrd.  These allegations all have varying levels of truth or mendacity in them.  The “bigot” charge is the biggest stretch, relying on an old Republican claim that Democrat policies hurt blacks more than they help them, supposedly by creating the welfare state and welfare mentality, thereby denying poor black people the ability to succeed for themselves.    Robert Byrd is another old story.  True, he was a member of the KKK back in the 1940s but quit them when he was still in his 20s and spent the rest of his long life apologizing for his actions.  For the last 30 years of his career he was a supporter of civil rights and had a 100 percent rating from the NAACP.   If he ever mentored Hillary, it was surely during the last part of his senate career when she was a beginning senator and he was the longest serving senator in history.   On the other hand, Trump’s campaign manager, the Breitbart guy, Steve Bannon’s connection to white supremacists is ongoing. 

 

BAD NEWS FOR TRUMP

Today, The New York Times published a long piece of investigative reporting on Donald Trump’s long history of discriminating against black tenants in his buildings, going back decades. He was repeatedly cited by the Dept. of Justice and sued multiple times for housing discrimination. Discrimination is easy to prove. A fair housing group sends a black person to rent an apartment and the person is told nothing is available. Then it sends a white person and all of a sudden lots of apartments are available. Then it sends another black person and suddenly nothing is available until the next white person shows up. It’s hard to explain that away when the group carefully documents (and possibly secretly records) the various visits to the building. Trump inherited the “no blacks” policy from his father, Fred Trump, a real estate developer before him. So, he didn’t invent it, but he didn’t kill it off when he took over either.

Trump’s response to the government’s citations and lawsuits was to countersue the government. He generally lost these cases, but his persistence eventually wore the government down. He signed a consent decree agreeing not to discriminate, but never admitted any guilt. A few years after signing the consent decree, the government sued him again for violating it. Eventually, demographic changes in New York forced him to start renting to blacks; otherwise, he couldn’t fill his buildings. But he made a point to pack them into a small number of buildings, so there were white buildings and black buildings.

Although this story is very old, now that Trump is nominally trying to court black voters (or at least make white voters believe he is not a bigot), these charges are very inconvenient and may well find their way into attack ads in the fall, especially since some of the victims of his discrimination are still around and would no doubt be happy to talk about their early experiences with Trump.

TRUMP WON’T DEPORT ALL MEXICANS
Trump’s campaign co-manager, Kellyanne Conway said today that Trump will not try to deport all Hispanics that are here illegally.   She said that he just wants to deport the bad ones and let the good ones stay.   That sounds a lot like the Obama policy.   Many of Trump’s supporters are not happy about this flip-flop, which Trump first called a “softening” and then denied he said that; instead, he said it was a “hardening”.    The far-right gives it the scarlet letter “A”  – for amnesty.   It’s hard to win on this issue.  Obama has faced lots of criticism from both sides – from the right for wanting to let long-term residents and those who were brought here as children stay here, and from the left because he has deported more immigrants than any of his predecessors.   Some claim that Obama deported more than the last 19 presidents combined, going back to 1892.   “Since coming to office in 2009, Obama’s government has deported more than 2.5 million people—up 23% from the George W. Bush years. More shockingly, Obama is now on pace to deport more people than the sum of all 19 presidents who governed the United States from 1892-2000, according to government data.”

WAS MLK A REPUBLICAN?
On today’s anniversary of MLK’s “I have a Dream” speech, many Republicans are repeating the claim that MLK was a Republican.  But is it true?   Best we can find out is “No, he was never a member of any political party,” but the myth continues, resurrected almost any time that King’s name comes up in

any political discussion or debate.  There are a few reasons that would make people believe it.  First, his father, MLK, Sr., was a member of the Republican Party until MLK, Jr.’s opponents, including many Republicans, started claiming that his son was a communist.  Second, like King’s father, most older African Americans, at least the ones permitted to vote, historically voted Republican because the Republican Party ended slavery, and the South was controlled by conservative Democrats, or as they came to be known as, “Dixiecrats.” and who had enacted the so-called Jim Crow laws. That all started to change when Harry Truman became president in 1945.   Although Truman came from a segregationist former slave state, Missouri, he strongly supported civil rights for African Americans.  Here is a Truman Speech on the matter and the Southern response.

As you can see, the only thing about southern attitudes that has changed since then is the name of the party that controls the South.  As president, Truman made several executive decisions on Civil Rights but probably the most important was ending racial segregation in the Military. Consequently, the Dixiecrats, starting with Strom Thurmond,  began their transition to becoming Republicans and African Americans began their transition to supporting the Democrat Party.  

 

The transition for both was completed when LBJ strong-armed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 through congress and signed it, saying, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a generation.”  As it turned out, he was extremely optimistic about the long term damage it would do to his party in the South. Another reason that people believe that MLK, Jr. was a Republican, was that his niece, Alveda King, said so.  However, King’s children all disagree.  Later, Alveda King retracted her statement, saying that she had spoken without knowing all the facts. Additionally, no one has ever found any record of King being a member of any party or being registered to vote as either a Republican or a Democrat.  Nevertheless, we will probably never hear the end of the myth, as it has been around for a good while and it fits what many people on the right would like to believe.

 

NO NEW POLLS TODAY – IT’S GOD’S DAY OFF.

— More Good News And Bad News Tomorrow —