Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [90]
This is why idiots like Bill Maher can make jokes like this (about the 2010 Republican sweep of Congress)—“I haven’t seen Republicans so happy about taking seats since they made Rosa Parks stand up.”25 When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, the mayor of Montgomery enforcing segregation on the buses was—of course—a segregationist Democrat, William A. “Tacky” Gayle.26
Even after a federal district court struck down segregation on Montgomery’s buses, Gayle appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which also ruled against Gayle. That’s when the Montgomery buses were finally desegregated. But try searching Gayle on Google—try searching his name in the history books—and see if you can find his political party. Who’s the “dumb twat” now? (As Maher called Sarah Palin on his HBO show.)27
In fact, it was only when there was an electoral risk to their political careers that the entire Democratic Party made a big show of supporting civil rights. Even then, both Eisenhower and Nixon did a better job enforcing the Court’s color-blind rulings than Kennedy or Johnson did. The Democrat presidents were always dragging their feet, trying not to upset the segregationist Democrats, the same way today’s Democrats refuse to upset abortion-mad feminists. In a hundred years, liberals will rewrite the history of abortion to make pro-life Democrat Robert Casey Sr. the country’s sole defender of the unborn.
Nixon indeed had something called the “Southern Strategy,” but it had nothing to do with appealing to racial resentment. His idea was to force nice patriotic, churchgoing Southerners to recognize what a rotten, treasonous bunch the Democrats had become. It was a regional version of his appeal to the Silent Majority.
Nixon had worked to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for which he was personally thanked by Martin Luther King. He was a card-carrying member of the NAACP in 1960. His Democratic opponent, John F. Kennedy, was not.
After losing his race for governor of California in 1962, Nixon began his political comeback with a 1966 column proclaiming that the Republican Party stood for small government and a strong national defense and would leave it to the Democrats “to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.” Nixon referred contemptuously to the Democrats as the “party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace”—all segregationists.
Not surprisingly, with an opening gambit like that, in the 1968 presidential election the segregationist votes went to Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, not Nixon. As Michael Barone notes, Nixon’s “status as a longtime supporter of civil rights in the Eisenhower administration and at the 1960 national convention, made it difficult for him to steal away Wallace’s votes.”28
Provably, Humphrey got the Wallace vote. At the outset of the campaign, Nixon was polling at 42 percent compared with Humphrey’s 29 percent. Meanwhile, segregationist George Wallace was polling at 22 percent. On Election Day, Nixon’s percentage remained virtually unchanged at 43.4 percent. Wallace’s had dropped to 13.5 percent. Where had the rest of the Wallace vote gone? It didn’t go to Nixon. Humphrey’s vote surged by about 12 percentage points—nearly as much as Wallace lost—giving him 42.7 percent of the votes cast on Election Day.29 Even if those Wallace voters stayed home, Nixon’s and Humphrey’s vote percentages ought to have increased by exactly the same factor. But Nixon’s percentage remained steady, while Humphrey’s skyrocketed.
And yet—just as with the Tea Partiers today—when Americans opposed Lyndon Johnson’s