EDITORIAL
Dean's racist ploy
Democratic presidential-hopeful Howard Dean,
who many mistakenly view as anti-war and therefore more
liberal, deserves to be denounced for the racist and craven
statement he made in a Des Moines Register interview: "I still
want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in
their pickup trucks." Later, at the "Rock the Vote" debate in
Boston, he refused to retract or apologize for the remark.
Dean is no fool. He knows that the Confederate flag is the
emblem of the slavocracy.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, another presidential candidate who
also is an African American civil rights leader and whose
campaign has been rendered virtually invisible by the corporate
media, responded that the Confederate flag "is like the
swastika to a Jewish person."
To whom was Dean appealing when he said, "We can't beat
George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross section of
Democrats"? This is not just populist demagogy. He is equating
broadness with racism by bringing in the Confederate flag. He's
not reaching out to white, working-class voters, he's reaching
out to white racists.
Dean made a similar remark in February at a Democratic
National Committee meeting. He was reportedly calling for the
Democrats to reverse the Republican Southern strategy, launched
in Richard Nixon's 1968 election campaign, that successfully
broke up what had been the "Solid South" dominated by the
Dixiecrats. Dean said then, "White folks in the South who drive
pickups with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be
voting with us and not them because their kids don't have
health insurance, and their kids need better schools, too."
You would think from Dean's remarks that the civil rights
struggle had never happened. As even Dean's rival for the
nomination, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, said, most
white workers in the South are not running around with the
Confederate flag these days. It is the emblem of conscious and
deliberate racists, in both the North and South. The coalition
of forces that fought to have the flag removed from the State
House in South Carolina included whites as well as African
Americans.
To pin this Klan emblem on Southern white workers is
misleading. Isn't Dean really reaching out to the Southern
racist ruling class that can trace its fortunes back to chattel
slavery? Isn't he beseeching the Southern wealthy elite to come
back to the Democratic Party once again?
If so, he's not the first liberal Democrat with national
ambitions to seek a coalition with racists. That was the
message that Jimmy Carter sent when he teamed up with
arch-segregationist Lester Maddox in 1970 to run for governor
and lieutenant governor, respectively, of Georgia. Ted Kennedy
was sending the same message when he demonstratively met with
George Wallace of Alabama in 1974 to see if he could get that
racist's support for a presidential bid two years later. These
capitalist politicians may talk about white men who drive
beat-up pickup trucks, but they're really speaking to the
chauffeured class that owns the industry and banking wealth--in
both the South and the North.
Reprinted from the Nov. 13, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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