The Eastern Strategy

Jeff Alworth

Following the success of the civil rights movement, the GOP developed the "Southern Strategy" to woo racist Dixie Dems to the Republican Party.  It had at its core the idea of "states' rights"--which Southern whites understood to mean the right to uphold local standards of segregation and to thwart federal legislation like affirmative action.  It has been a viable strategy for decades, used as recently as 2000, when Bush ran a push poll on the eve of the South Carolina primary to ask voters if it would affect their vote to know that John McCain was the father of a "black baby."   It reared its head again in 2002, when Trent Lott talked his way out of the Senate Majority Leadership when he hailed Strom Thurmond. 

Barack Obama, a serious condender for the Democratic nomination, might have expected the Southern Strategy would swing into motion when he announced his candidacy.  But now it turns out that there's a better smear: link him to Muslims. 

Last week, a right-wing magazine owned by the partisan Washington Times ran a story suggesting that Obama had been "educated in a Madrassa as a young boy."  It based its obvious smear on a single, unnamed source who--get this--blamed the Clinton campaign for trying to sully Obama's name.  (In politics, that's the rare two-fer smear.)  The article was filled with lies and misdirection (I've linked it, but it doesn't bear quoting) and should have died the life of most of these propaganda pieces, kept alive only in the minds of the radical fringe.

Instead, Fox News picked it up.

Smear tactics are as old as politics (the founding fathers weren't above them), and survive because they're successful.  America's panic over terrorism has created a fairly substantial bigoted response, and the political foes of Obama appear to be girded to use this bigotry to beat him.  (Hillary's not involved; that was collateral smearing.)  They're pernicious not only because they are successful on a subliminal level and without the slightest substantiation, but because they encourage the very bigotry they use in their smears.  There's nothing wrong with Muslims, but this flap will further blacken the image of Muslims in America and isolate them from the majority culture.

It is a sad ironly that Obama, perhaps the first serious black contender for the presidency (though I thought Jesse had a shot!) is getting the first trial in a new form of bigotry-fueled politics. 

Fortunately, there is a silver lining to all of this.  A recent article in Psychology Today identified what it described as "The 9/11 Effect," in which fear has caused Americans to vote more conservatively.  Researchers have discovered that when people are scared, they grow more authoritarian and vote for whomever seems most likely to assure safety.  But here's the good news, researchers have also discovered that emotion-induced political impulses can be reversed:

To test this, Solomon and his colleagues prompted two groups to think about death and then give opinions about a pro-American author and an anti-American one. As expected, the group that thought about death was more pro-American than the other. But the second time, one group was asked to make gut-level decisions about the two authors, while the other group was asked to consider carefully and be as rational as possible. The results were astonishing. In the rational group, the effects of mortality salience were entirely eliminated. Asking people to be rational was enough to neutralize the effects of reminders of death. Preliminary research shows that reminding people that as human beings, the things we have in common eclipse our differences—what psychologists call a "common humanity prime"—has the same effect.

I take this to mean that for smear politics to work, it must thrive in the shadows of coded language, away from serious scrutiny by an appalled citizenry.  The Insight magazines of the world have always existed, powering the engine of bigotry that kept the Southern Strategy alive.  Now that major news operations like Fox news and the legion of conservative bloggers and talk radio hosts act as big-time promoters of this sludge, we have to be even more vigilent.  But the response should not be to ignore these attacks as beneath our contempt.  Otherwise, they'll flourish and become a reinforcing cycle.  Insight is despicable for running this hit piece and Fox is complicit in bigotry for picking it up.  They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

(Incidentally, CNN did their own investigation and found the smears to be false.  Obama did attend school in Malaysia; it was just a regular school.  Fox subsequently ran a "retraction" that simultaneously repeated the assertions but blamed Insight for its own transgressions.)

By Jeff Alworth Jan. 23, 2007