By Kevin Foley
I’m a part-time South Carolina resident and Newt Gingrich was once my U.S. Representative. Thus, I feel I know something about the good folks of the Palmetto State as well as the self-anointed “Reagan conservative” running for president.
If he were alive and lucid today, Reagan wouldn’t give Gingrich the time of day so disgusted would he be at what the former Speaker has done to his beloved Republican party. But the two do have something in common and it ain’t pretty.
After receiving the nomination in 1980, Reagan could have given his first speech at Mount Rushmore or before the Lincoln Monument or maybe at the Statue of Liberty.
Instead he chose Philadelphia, Mississippi, significant for but one horrible tragedy in 1964. It’s the dusty little backwater where the Ku Klux Klan infamously murdered three civil rights workers.
It was the GOP’s so-called Southern Strategy and what better way to demonstrate conservative affinity for white southerner “values” than by symbolically denouncing the civil rights movement? Naturally the Great Communicator was too smart to say anything overtly racist so he resorted to code he knew his audience would receive loud and clear.
Chief among this was “state’s rights.” It was low brow, disgraceful and unworthy of a man seeking the highest office in the land.
Gingrich also knows what makes a lot of white southern voters tick, so it was no surprise he won in South Carolina. But he didn’t do it by telling voters what sort of president he would be. No, Newt won by skillfully playing the race card, appealing to the anger and bias percolating just beneath the affable exteriors of certain white South Carolinians.
This is the state, after all, that proudly flies the Stars and Bars over its capitol even though African-American tax payers make up 30 percent of South Carolina’s population and most if not all consider the Confederate battle flag highly offensive. For them, it’s analogous to a public building in Germany displaying the swastika as a symbol of the nation’s “heritage.”
For all of President Obama’s happy talk of a “post racial” America, when you live in the Deep South, you know how some white people down here really feel about a black man occupying the White House.
Newt knows. That’s why he brought out his dog whistle in South Carolina, using the race-baiting code words that won him standing ovations at last week’s South Carolina debate and propelled him to victory.
“Food stamp president” was probably the most inflammatory among these, conjuring up for his audience the stereotypical image of lazy blacks waiting for hand outs paid for by hard working whites. Gingrich then doubled down, saying he wants to tell NAACP leaders at their convention to encourage African-Americans to seek pay checks and not welfare, and while they’re at it, put those kids to work as janitors in their schools.
As I say, low brow, disgraceful and unworthy of a man seeking the highest office in the land.
Gingrich is conducting a scorched earth campaign he knows he can’t win, and not because of his sexual proclivities. While South Carolinians might be willing to suspend reality, independent, undecided, and moderate Republican voters in key northern swing states won’t. They know past performance is the best predictor of future behavior, especially where Gingrich is concerned.
Just as he sought to bring down the Clinton presidency over a stained blue dress before he was hoisted on his own petard, Gingrich now seems gleefully prepared to derail the GOP. His “campaign” is really just a cynical public relations media tour aimed at ginning up speaking fees, book deals and maybe a gig on Fox News after the primary dust settles.
President Obama couldn’t be more delighted.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |