Gonzo Primary Weekly: Race, history confront Democrats in South Carolina
A weekly edition of the Gonzo Primary, the un-horse race of journalism and politics.
The candidates’ walk-out songs are out, which means this thing is getting real. Subscribe and get independent journalism and thinking about our political moment.
At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose both what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that clarifies our American political moment going into the presidential election in 2020. It’ll be a process. I’m Jeremy Borden, independent journalist, reluctant political junkie, with bylines in publications big and small but with a sense that more of us in the media need to tilt at windmills if the mess that has been made of the American Experiment is going to continue.
So far, I’ve announced a new project called The Gonzo Primary by defining the broad parameters for what healthy media coverage might look like as we start from scratch. This week(ish), I looked at Rahm Emanuel’s move to both a new career as a “journalist” while holding down a new big money job for a Wall Street firm and lessons that journalists still haven’t heeded from the 1972 presidential campaign and the seminal work Boys on the Bus.
Below: We’ll dive into my old stomping grounds in South Carolina and the importance of new comments from longtime U.S. House Representative Jim Clyburn.
What I’m Reading
After diving in on the lessons from the seminal journalism work Boys on the Bus from 1972 this week, I think there’s one point in particular worth taking another look at —and one I hope that journalists spend a bit more time trying to define as we roll on through the primary season: objectivity.
From my earlier piece:
It’s time for outdate conventions that only serve politicians and big business well to be fully reconsidered. While many confuse the leanings of particular outlets as partisan shilling—the New York Times likely unfair torpedoing of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is one obvious example that things are more complex for left or right-leaning publications—it’s also true that journalists have to continue to do more to bring people together around truth-seeking. Otherwise, when people see truth and it conflicts with their worldview, it’s easier to dismiss.
Speaking of hard-to-square truths we are again grappling with the insanely stupid drumbeat of war emanating from Washington, this time without even a half-baked effort to draw in international partners. In a well-timed piece from the New Yorker, it’s worth considering the mastermind of all this: John Bolton.
One of the things I like most about Trump (and worried about for candidate Hillary Clinton) is that Trump has always been consistent on at least the fact that we need to wind down our conflicts, not ramp them up. Clinton, of course, voted for the Iraq war and played a role in escalating conflicts around the world.
Now, Trump has hawk National Security Advisor John Bolton in his ear, a man who sees the world in black and white and, frankly, seems to love war and wants one badly with Iran. Even in an otherwise roundly reported New Yorker profile, it’s unclear why Trump would hire Bolton—except that he liked that he would defend him on Fox, also favors a one-state solution in Israel.
But Bolton is a serious threat and has made great inroads in pushing the president, and thus the country, toward conflict. While Trump doesn’t seem to have much of a defined foreign policy—aside from the occasional lavishing of praise on dictators and ultimately inconsequential summits with North Korea’s dictator—Trumpism has meant, broadly, that he wants to establish a new world order with“America First” and leave out meddling in the Middle East.
Until, apparently, now. For me, that New Yorker piece at least solidified that perhaps the most important person in the U.S.’s national security establishment could care less about what happens after the bombs drop:
In the early two-thousands, as the Bush Administration was negotiating to limit North Korea’s nuclear program, Bolton stridently advocated war. Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, was so concerned that he brought Bolton into a private meeting on the consequences of military strikes: “I gave him a ten-minute brief on what a war with North Korea would look like—a hundred thousand casualties in the first thirty days, many of them Americans. The Japanese that would die. The Chinese that would die. The fact that Seoul, one of the most modern and forward-looking cities in the world, would probably be reduced to the Dark Ages. I told him, ‘That’s Passchendaele, John. That’s Ypres.’ ”
He said that Bolton was unmoved: “John looked at me and said, ‘Are you done? Clearly, you do war. I don’t do war. I do policy.’ ”
The stupidity of “I don’t do war, I do policy” isn’t really worth too much more digital ink here, except to say that for someone who went to Yale not to give a shit about what happens after you bomb a whole bunch of people explains a lot about why we are where we are right now.
Also in the reading category …
This week, I added Ryan Grim’s new book We Got People—which features a heavy dose of Rahm Emanuel and Democratic Party hypocrisy—to my list to learn more about the modern Democratic Party while I (try) to finish Beautiful Country Burn Again about the last campaign. Let me know what else I should read—lighter fare always considered but rarely accomplished.
This Really Happened
If and when Joe Biden’s campaign goes under, his moment this week decrying the state of politics and the fact that he could make friends with a foe to get things done—in this case avowed segregationist and self-proclaimed racist former Senator James O. Eastland—will be remembered as the first big ripple.
Despite Biden’s long career in the Senate and as vice president, his presidential aspirations have sputtered badly twice before. In other words, a Biden presidency and new head of the Democratic Party is plausible but not likely.
At the same time, I imagine a lot of Democrats will, at least quietly, nod their heads and agree with Biden this week. Remember when things were civil? Remember when we didn’t get 28 news alerts per day because the president wants to start a fight with a new foe every quarter hour?
Of course, it seems like Democrats—worried about their jobs or pissing off their friends—are more focused on one part of what Biden said and not the other. The racially loaded language (I’ll get to the quote below), though, shows just how ham-handed the former vice president is on these subjects.
And it’s been fascinating but uncomfortable to watch African American Democrats who aren’t in the race dance their way around the issue.
Biden said, according to the Washington Post’s Daily 202:
“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son,’” the 76-year-old, who served 36 years in the Senate, told donors in New York on Tuesday night.
Eastland, a Mississippi senator who owned a cotton plantation, described African Americans as an “inferior” race and warned that integration would lead to "mongrelization.” Biden also mentioned Herman Talmadge, the notorious Georgia segregationist who blockaded progress on civil rights for decades.
“You go down the list of all these guys,” he said. “Well, guess what? At least there was some civility. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”
All this not to obscure the continued shitshow from the White House: last week, our president said he wouldn’t mind taking opposition research on an opponent from a foreign power.
Trump hasn’t given an interview to a major news network in four months—perhaps because he says stuff like this when he does. And this time he gives an interview to former Clinton aide and ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos? I wonder if Trump and the Clintons will hang out when all this is over…
From the ABC transcript:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Your campaign this time around, if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on opponents, should they accept it or should they call the FBI?
TRUMP: I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen, I don’t, there’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, “We have information on your opponent.” Oh, I think I’d want to hear it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You want that kind of interference in our elections?
TRUMP: It’s not an interference, they have information. I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI. If I thought there was something wrong. But when somebody comes up with oppo research, right, that they come up with oppo research. Oh, let’s call the FBI. The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it, but you go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it, they always have. And that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.
[Bold mine.]
I wish Stephanopoulous had followed up on this point, but is Trump saying that everyone in Congress accepts opposition research help or intel from foreign countries? Sometimes the truth comes out in the oddest ways.
The Gonzo Primary: Democrats in South Carolina
Iowa Caucus Countdown: 219 days
South Carolina’s history can feel choking, like an omnipresent blanket stitched together from its legacy of violence and racism. I was a statehouse and political reporter there for a little more than two years, and the statehouse grounds are something of a living tribute to many of those ideals; case in point, part of the Articles of Secession, a long diatribe complaining about northern states’ and the federal government’s growing disfavor of slavery, are etched in marble next to a statue of John C. Calhoun on the second floor.
As Corey Hutchins put it in an epic beginning in a 2012 story about South Carolina and state corruption for the Center for Public Integrity:
To stroll through the State House grounds in Columbia, S.C., is to behold by many accounts a memorial to political failure. There’s a towering statue of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the one-eyed savage racist. There’s a bust of Marion Sims, noted as the father of American gynecology, who performed extensive experimental surgery on slave women without anesthesia before operating on upper-class whites. Then there are statues of former Gov. James Byrnes, a defender of segregation, and of Strom Thurmond the Dixiecrat.
And so with that the Democratic primary field spent Friday at a party Clyburn throws for himself that has become a political rite of passage, his famous fish fry.
It’s worth backing up a minute to take a look at Clyburn, a civil rights stalwart who has served in the House since 1993.
An establishment Democrat if there ever was one, Clyburn’s weight in South Carolina is undisputed. And that sort of old school establishment support matters, especially there.
In a recent interview, Clyburn took on the 1994 crime bill passed by Democrats—with votes from both Biden and Clyburn—and is a great example of the kind of centrist Democratic policy so many on today’s left are fed up with. The crime bill is largely responsible for putting a generation of people of color behind bars, especially for otherwise non-violent drug offenses.
But Clyburn doesn’t think that will be a problem for Biden with the Democratic Party’s largely African American base. From NPR:
Clyburn says he thinks the crime bill divide is more with white people. “That's exactly right. That is not real. Not with black people,” Clyburn said, stressing there is a different conversation inside the black community. A member of the African Methodist Episcopal church, another epicenter of South Carolina Democratic politics, Clyburn said there is a different conversation about Biden happening in those corners. "They're very excited about Joe Biden, most of them know what I just shared with you about the crime bill, but they don't have a megaphone," he said. "I mean y'all got all the print. Y'all write this stuff. All they can do is talk about it among themselves. That's why Joe Biden is running 76% among them and so much doubt among y'all."
It's also why Clyburn said he is not surprised that Biden is out-performing two black candidates, Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey, among South Carolina's black voters. "It's not a surprise to me because black people go with their with history. They have a relationship with Biden, and they believe in them."
A lifelong civil rights activist — he met his wife in jail following a student demonstration — Clyburn leans in to conversations about racial politics. "It shouldn't be hard. The whole question of race ought not be hard, it's real. And I don't understand why we have such a hard time discussing it, and then we can very easily say race is a big issue in the country."
It is worth pausing and seriously considering for a moment that a man who has spent his life fighting for civil rights thinks that it’s only white people who care about disproportionate policing and overly harsh penalties in America.
I’ll write more about South Carolina in the coming weeks and months, in part because of my own history there and in part because it is a perpetual mistake by media and politicos to dismiss southern politics as something “other.” As the MSM troops around and broadcasts every comment and new poll, The Gonzo Primary can and should become a place where history, especially local history, is looked at anew and contemplated for its importance in helping us understand how we got to this political moment and whether the American experiment can move productively forward.
Corey Hutchins’ 2012 analysis of South Carolina is hardly outdated—and could easily be written in some fashion about many states and the political establishment as a whole.
The biggest problems that exist are the manipulative fashions by which political parties are financed; antagonism by politicians toward a transparent government; hostility to the press … widespread institutional secrecy in disclosing assets, and loopholes in the state’s ethics laws large enough to dock a Confederate submarine.
In South Carolina, critics say, politics trumps law, and politicians often rule as lords, as evidenced by documented accounts of clear abuses of power. An undercurrent of fear and political interference bubbles throughout the state’s civil service, one that is shot through with cronyism and patronage.
History has been harsh to the people of South Carolina — an estimated population of 4.7 million, according to the Census Bureau — who did not occupy its ruling class. If things don’t change dramatically, so may its future.
That statue of John C. Calhoun as a hero in South Carolina’s state capitol is hardly limited to the state’s walls. Calhoun once called slavery not a necessary evil, as had been argued, but a “positive good.” When it was time to consider his place in the history of the U.S. Senate, in 1959, a Senate committee decided that Calhoun was among the greatest senators of all time.
The leader of that committee? Senator John F. Kennedy, the future president and civil rights ally. We don’t like to acknowledge our glaring contradictions between ideals and practice in American life—comments like Biden’s are, at the very least, making us do so.
I haven’t decided if I’ll cover in any way the Democratic debates this week—there will be enough noise out there and it is still so early in the cycle. If I did, what sort of coverage would you want to see? Thoughts always appreciated, borden.jeremy@gmail.com.
‘Til next time!
This post has corrected the year of Corey Hutchin’s 2012 Center for Public Integrity piece about South Carolina.