Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [87]
In 1996, R. W. Apple, then–New York Times Washington bureau chief, casually referred to “the Republican Party’s recent record as the vehicle of white supremacy in the South beginning with the Goldwater campaign and reaching its apex in Richard M. Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ in 1968 and 1972.”8
Apple continued, “Republicans appealed to Nixon Democrats (later Reagan Democrats) in the northern suburbs, many of them ethnic voters who had left the cities to escape from blacks, with promises to crack down on welfare cheats and to impose law and order, and they fought against affirmative action.”9
It never dawns on liberals that people might actually want to crack down on welfare cheats, impose law and order, and abolish racially discriminatory “affirmative action” plans. In any event, Nixon wasn’t one of them: He invented affirmative action. Apple’s statement was the opposite of the truth.
In 2002, Jack White, which I believe is a pen name for Keith Olbermann, wrote an article for Time magazine online accusing the Republican Party of having a “four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting.” White said Reagan “set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door.”10 To insult Republicans, liberals compare them to Democrats.
In 2008, Newsweek matter-of-factly reported, “In 1968, Richard Nixon used code words like ‘law and order’ to exploit racial fears as part of his ‘Southern Strategy.’ ”11
In fact, it was Eisenhower who broke the Democrats’ hold on the South in 1952, and if anyone was appealing to bigots that year, it wasn’t Eisenhower. Democrat Adlai Stevenson, known to experience “personal discomfort in the presence of Negroes,”12 chose as his running mate John Sparkman of Alabama, a Democrat segregationist.
And yet the Old South—which according to mainstream media accounts voted Republican solely out of racial resentment—suddenly started voting Republican in 1952. Ike carried Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida outright, and nearly stole Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia from Stevenson. (Eisenhower lost Kentucky by a microscopic .07 percent and lost West Virginia and South Carolina by fewer than 4 percentage points.) This was just four years after Democrat-turned-Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond won four Southern states. But running with a segregationist didn’t help Stevenson in the South a few years later.
Then, in 1956, the Republican Party platform endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools; the Democratic platform did not, and would not, as long as Democrats were winning elections by appealing to the racist mob. This led the black congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to break with his party and endorse Eisenhower for president.
Governor Orval Faubus, progressive New Deal Democrat, blocked the schoolhouse door to the Little Rock Central High School with the state’s National Guard rather than allow nine black students to attend. In response, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to take it out of Faubus’s hands. Then he sent the 101st Airborne Division to walk the black children to school and stay with them throughout the day.
Eisenhower implemented the 1948 executive order President Truman had issued—but then ignored—desegregating the military. Also unlike Truman, Eisenhower hired blacks for prominent positions in his administration, such as assistant secretary of Labor (J. Ernest Wilkens), chairman of the U.S. Board of Parole (Scovel Richardson), UN delegate from the United States (Charles Mahoney), administrative officer on White House staff (Fredrick Morrow), minister to Romania (Clifton R. Wharton), and members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (George M. Johnson and J. Ernest