Double standard on GOP ‘plantation’
Blame it on Newt Gingrich.
That’s what I thought as Republicans rushed to accuse Hillary Rodham Clinton of playing the race card when she told a Harlem audience that Republicans run the House of Representatives like a plantation. She probably pulled that language out of the former GOP House speaker’s soiled political playbook.
The House “has been run like a plantation, and you know what I’m talking about,” the New York Democrat said during a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday address. “It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard.”
Republicans were quick to return fire.
In a question-and-answer session with White House correspondents the following day, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan declared that Clinton’s plantation reference was “out of bounds.”
Across town in the Capitol, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said tartly of Clinton: “If she’s trying to be racist, I think that’s unfortunate.” A mouthpiece for the Republican National Committee took more deadly aim and accused Clinton of being “racially divisive.”
Even first lady Laura Bush got in a salvo. She called Clinton’s remarks “ridiculous.”
Overshadowed by this din of Republican criticism is what one-time GOP wunderkind Gingrich said in 1994, on the eve of the congressional election that put his party in control of the House of Representatives – and made him speaker.
“I clearly fascinate them,” he said tauntingly of Democrats. “I’m much more intense, much more persistent, much more willing to take risks to get it done. Since they think it is their job to run the plantation, it shocks them that I’m actually willing to lead the slave rebellion.”
If you don’t remember Republicans rushing before microphones to condemn Gingrich’s characterization of the House as a plantation, it’s because they didn’t. Nor was there a loud outcry of condemnation from Republicans two years earlier when Jack Kemp, then the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the administration of President Bush’s father, used a plantation analogy like a slaver’s whip.
In a speech at Hostos Community College in New York City, Kemp said establishment of enterprise zones in impoverished areas of the country would help residents escape the “welfare plantation.” Then in 1994 while serving as co-director of Empower America and contemplating a run for the GOP presidential nomination, Kemp called for a reform of the nation’s welfare system to break poor people’s dependency on “the welfare plantation.”
That kind of talk from Kemp and Gingrich drew cheers, not jeers, from Republicans. But when Clinton employed similar language, she ended up in their crosshairs.
So what’s going on here? I suspect GOP leaders believe they inherited the right to make a political point through the use of language that conjures up memories of this country’s abusive treatment of blacks from Clarence Thomas, one of the party’s leading blacks.
Remember when Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court was threatened by accusations of sexual harassment? While the charge came from Anita Hill, one of his co-workers during his days as a political appointee in a Republican administration, Thomas’ wrath was directed at Senate Democrats who treated her charges seriously.
“As far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” Thomas said of the way he was grilled about the sex charges during his confirmation hearing. Despite the accusation, Thomas – who went on to narrowly win confirmation to the court – is a darling of conservative Republicans. During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush declared Thomas a model Supreme Court justice.
All of this leads me to believe that Republican rage over Clinton’s charge that GOP leaders are running the House like a plantation has little to do with the substance of what she said.
They’re angry, I suspect, because she dug deep into their political lexicon for the words she used to attack them.