Where Scott Walker goes in search of right-wing and even racist political support, Ronald Reagan went before him.
Back in 1980, beginning what would be his successful quest for the presidency, Reagan made his first stop on the campaign trail a controversial one. He delivered a states-right speech in tiny Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been brutally killed 16 years earlier.
Last Saturday, many Americans observed and even celebrated the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King and the historic civil rights March on Washington. Meanwhile, Walker -- the right-wing Republican governor of Wisconsin -- gave a speech in Montgomery, Alabama, original capital of the confederacy.
Walker has been jet-setting across America for more than a year, making strident speeches and amassing record amounts of campaign cash in what many expect will be a bid for the GOP presidential nomination. If you think his visit was timed just coincidentally to the March on Washington anniversary, you may think otherwise after you read on.
Back in 2004, Juan Williams wrote about Reagan's superficially odd first campaign stop in the once openly segregationist small town in Mssissippi:
... It was at that sore spot on the racial map that Reagan revived talk about states' rights and curbing the power of the federal government.
To many it sounded like code for announcing himself as the candidate for white segregationists. After he defeated President Carter, a native Southerner, Reagan led an administration that seemed to cater to Southerners still angry over the passage of the Civil Rights Act after 16 years. The Reagan team condemned busing for school integration, opposed affirmative action and even threatened to veto a proposed extension of the Voting Rights Act (the sequel to the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed a year later and focused on election participation). President Reagan also tried to allow Bob Jones University, a segregated Southern school, to reclaim federal tax credits that had long been denied to racially discriminatory institutions.
The genial Californian Republican denied there was any racism implicit in those policies. Even when he was characterizing poor women as welfare queens driving around in pink Cadillacs, he said it was a merely matter of encouraging people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. The America he seemed to envision had no need to deal with racial divisions, and he said his only desire was to encourage self-sufficiency for all Americans and to reduce all Americans' dependence on government programs ... .
http://www.npr.org/...
Reagan has been one of Scott Walker's main political models. Though Walker often speaks in low-key, I'm just trying to fix things in a sensible, spirit of cooperation way, his record in public officer so far is replete with controversial, bomb-throwing moves that echo some of Reagan's worst views and excesses.
Walker has vigorously fought health care reform, intruded into the private relationship between women and their doctors, favored private and religious school funding while cutting public education, made it easier for anti-environmental interests to privatize profits and socialize the environmental costs, loosening of gun controls, restraints on voting rights, and much more. Worst of all, he summarily destroyed collective bargaining for most public employees in Wisconsin. And now he has begun to paint himself as a kind of civil-rights victim for doing it. And saying that in a place where black Americans really did have their civil rights denied.
In an interesting and largely overlooked blog entry at Uppity Wisconsin, a progressive web site (URL below), Jud Lounsbury made the point:
This past Saturday, Scott Walker chose to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's legendary March on Washington by going to the original capital of the confederacy: Montgomery, Alabama. In fact, the hotel he spoke-at was once the spot of the Confederate government's offices-- there was even a historical marker near the hotel with a Confederate rebel flag displayed prominenty!
And even though Montgomery was also the epicenter of the civil rights stuggle and where Rosa Parks famously stood her ground, Walker chose to ignore that and instead talk about his own struggle, claiming that his mother and and son were spit-upon in 2011 when Walker took away public workers' right to collectively bargain:
"He said he received death threats, and his mother and son were shouted at and spit upon during a trip to the grocery store."
Hmmm... this doesn't pass the smell test. This is the first time Walker has claimed that anyone in his family were spit upon and I find it hard to believe that Walker, who is perhaps the most opportunistic victim in Wisconsin history, would have waited for nearly two years to tell anyone about it.
Considering that Martin Luther King was killed while he was trying to help public workers in Memphis, Tennessee, (that were spit upon and much more for trying to stand up for their rights), it is the height of absurdity that Walker would travel to the capitol of the confederacy and claim that his family was spit upon for taking away workers' rights.
http://www.uppitywis.org/...
So there you have it: Nixon's "southern strategy," exploited both by Reagan and now Walker, the latest Republican wolf in sheep's clothing. But he's worse than Reagan, because like too many tea party types in modern politics, he personalizes his views and expects voters to see him and themselves as victims.
We're to ignore that fact that right now, thanks to Walkerism, ordinary citizens simply singing union folk songs in the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda are being arrested and in some cases manhandled by Walker's own security force -- while his administration fights a court case so he can continue ban free speech in violation of the state constitution. Sounds a lot like the way southern communities once treated their black citizens, like Birmingham's "Bull" Connor, who in the 1960s thought nothing of bashing black Americans in service to segregation. Of course, today's versions of Connor are focused on economic as well as racial segregation.
Don't overlook the fact that Walker already has a ghost writer working on a campaign-timed book on the battle he started in Wisconsin over union rights. Working title: "Unintimidated." Walker really does see himself as a victim, you see, which is why he's going to keep on fighting all those "takers" who are grabbing your money and your job, while running wild in the streets. Law and order! And tax hikes on the poor, too.