Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [92]
Black civil rights groups gave Nixon little credit for the plan, and white construction workers hated it. He knew the Philadelphia plan hurt him politically, but he did it anyway.32
Being a Republican, Nixon was not a demagogue. He had no interest in demonizing the South—as if that were the sole locus of discrimination in America. As Mitchell said, “Watch what we do.” Democrats were the exact opposite, demanding hallelujahs for every kind word they ever spoke to a black person, while doing very little to actually end racial discrimination.
In the 1960 campaign, for example, an exceedingly reluctant JFK was pressured by adviser Harris Wofford into placing a quick call to Coretta Scott King when her husband was in the Reidsville jail in Georgia—and then allowed that two-minute phone call to be wildly publicized in the black community.33 His opponent Nixon—who would go on to preside over the most massive desegregation drive the nation had ever seen as well as the country’s first affirmative action program—made no comment on King’s jailing.
But the Kennedy campaign played up that phone call for all it was worth. Pamphlets were printed up titled “No Comment” Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.34 The phone call even persuaded longtime Republican and Nixon supporter Martin Luther King Sr. to switch his support to Kennedy, saying, “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion.” But now, he said, Kennedy “can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this.”35 MLK Jr. stayed neutral, while all the other leading black Baptist ministers “firmly” reendorsed Richard Nixon.
Democrats spent a hundred years enforcing legal discrimination against blacks, or—at best—dragging their heels on enforcing black civil rights, but then turned around and crowed for fifty years about a friendly phone call to Mrs. King. With a few symbolic gestures, the Democrats grabbed the civil rights mantle in 1960 and never let it go.
In fact, it was the Democrats’ obstructionism that created the environment for nonviolent—and then violent—civil rights protests in the first place. Thurgood Marshall was bringing lawsuits and winning case after case before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Redeeming blacks’ civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law. If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we’d be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day.
Consider that Brown v. Board of Education, eliminating “separate but equal” in the public schools, was decided in 1954. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the decision. And then, from the end of his presidency until Nixon’s election in 1968, nothing much changed. Nixon came in and wiped out segregated schools in one year.
In 1976, the entire South—all eleven states of the Old Confederacy, except the great Commonwealth of Virginia—flipped right back again and voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter. Was that because Carter was appealing to bigots? Or is it only a secret “Southern Strategy” of pandering to racists when Republicans win the South?
By 1980, Southerners as well as the rest of the country realized Carter was a complete nincompoop and voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. Carter and his vice presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, won only their own respective states of Georgia and Minnesota, plus Hawaii and West Virginia.