GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul still wages war against civil rights. We shouldn’t be surprised since Paul repeatedly has gotten into hot water nearly every time he opens his mouth about anything that remotely touches on race.
This time Paul sailed past the outer limits with his defiant boast that he would not have voted for the landmark 1964 Civil Rights bill. That’s right, the 1964 bill that has been the law of the land for nearly six decades, and Paul still opposes it.
Paul’s rap is as absurd and tortured as the one Southern Democrats and Northern GOP conservatives bottled up for more than a year in Congress, which they used to pretty up their opposition. It violated property rights. Nearly six decades after their efforts failed, Paul tells an interviewer, “To say I’m for property rights and for state’s rights, and therefore I’m a racist, that’s just outlandish.”
Give Them What They Want
What else would you call it? The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment wiped away the bogus claim that property rights trumps racial discrimination a century before Paul and Jim Crow maintenance proponents used this ploy to torpedo the Civil Rights bill. There’s method, though, to Paul’s silly and repeated knock of the law. He’s now a declared GOP Presidential candidate. He knows legions of frustrated, disgusted, even enraged defrocked GOP backers and purported libertarians are desperate for an alternative to the drab, lackluster, downright zany cast of would-be GOP presidential contenders.
Paul gives them what they want, a candidate who will say anything to tweak the establishment. Paul actually garnered a 49 percent approval rating in the recent AP-GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications.
That high an approval rating put him far ahead of Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Jon Huntsman, former Utah Governor and more recently Ambassador to China in the GOP favorability derby.
Minmizing Government’s Role
The cornerstone of Paul’s appeal is his view of government and what it should and should not do about civil rights. Paul holds that government should have minimal or better still no role in civil rights laws and enforcement. The government passed and enforced civil rights laws, did nothing to solve the country's racial ills, and worse, fueled even more racial polarization, he says. That old, worn and thoroughly discredited view warms the hearts of the packs of closet bigots who pine for the days when racial and gender discrimination was the American norm and government did little to protect black and gay rights.
On his campaign website ronpaul2008.com Paul highlighted this as “Issue: Racism.” “Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry.” In other words, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of education school desegregation decision, the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and numerous of court decisions and state laws that bar discrimination are worthless. Worse, said Paul, they actually promoted bigotry by dividing Americans into race and class.
Paul was outraged during his short lived Presidential bid in 2008 when he was dinged as a racist when that and embarrassing newsletters were cited, either written or authorized by Paul on his sites in the 1990s along with racially frontloaded inflammatory quips that bashed blacks. The Paul-attributed digs and insults called blacks chronic welfare grifters, thugs, lousy parents, and said they are inherently racist toward whites. Paul vehemently denied he said any of those things.
The quips appeared in his officially approved newsletters. No evidence exists that he wrote a correction or issued a clarification. The jury then and now is still out on whether those views truly represent his feelings. He loudly protests that he’s not a racist now because he has to if he is to have any credibility as a serious Presidential contender.
An anti-civil rights position linked directly to the old property rights canard is another matter. It fits neatly into the stock libertarian argument that the best thing that government can do is stay out of the affairs of private citizens and private business. That the root of America’s woes — bloated spending, soaring deficits, Congressional gridlock, crippling energy dependence, massive tax disparities, the drug plague, and even America’s wars — are the result of top heavy government interference and intrusion in the lives of Americans. Paul knows that spicing up the horribly distorted Jeffersonian principle of limited government with race is always a good catchall.
It is a surefire way to get the media and public attention, and to get back in the political hunt. Fallen media curiosity Donald Trump used the race tact to masterful effectiveness by recycling the birther craziness about President Obama’s birth certificate. It didn’t last, but he got his 15 minutes.
Paul will get more than that. Unlike Trump, he is a politician who knows how to get and sustain attention. Knocking civil rights when all else fails is always good for that.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
