Dick Polman has an interesting article in the Philadelphia Inquirer today. Lott’s defenders — Robert Novak, Rush Limbaugh, Paul Weyrich, Terry Jeffrey — using the “you’re one, too!” (or in Gore’s case, “So’s your old man!) defense (these are my terms, by the way, not Polman’s), pointing to “liberal hypocrisy.” They make the argument that Lott is being attacked only because he is a Republican; Democrats, they say, have gotten away with similar crude remarks.
- Sen. Robert Byrd telling CNN: “I’ve seen a lot of white niggers in my time. I’m going to use that word.”
- Sen. Ernest Hollings telling an interviewer in 1993 that African leaders liked going to meetings in Geneva because there they could enjoy a good meal “rather than eating each other.” As governor, in 1962, he had flown the Confederate flag.
- Bill Clinton praised Sen. J. William Fulbright, who signed the “Southern Manifesto” and voted against the Civil Rights Act.
- Sen. Al Gore, Sr., voted against the Civil Rights Act.
- Harry Truman joined the KKK in 1922 and wrote to his fiancee that “I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa.”
Polman writes that “Byrd and Hollings received scant media coverage,” and he cites some independent observers — Larry Sabato of UVa. and Roll Call — who agree that the media didn’t do its job. He also presents the rebuttal, which is that these people didn’t have leadership positions, they apologized convincingly. My own view is that these rebuttal points are reasonable, but another isn’t.
Hollings and Byrd, despite their remarks, generally vote with the national Democratic Party on civil rights issues; their words did not serve as a window into their work as lawmakers.
In other words, if you vote with us on racial preferences in the present we will excuse even recent reminders that you supported racial preferences in the past. This confirms, rather than refutes, the double standard defense.
In the final analysis, however, what Lott said and how the Republicans should treat him, and thus define their party, must be independent of what the Democrats have done. Thus when Terry Jeffrey, editor of Human Events says, “regardless of Lott’s sins, ‘undoubtedly, Democrats are worse,'” he sounds exactly like Clinton’s defenders who excused the inexcusable because his enemies, Starr and the Republicans, were worse.
That was unpersuasive then, and it’s unpersuasive now.
