The South's GOP Isn't About Economics

By: Rheta Grimsley Johnson

The creeks are full with rain, and there's a stark, wintry beauty about the little Mississippi towns I'm passing through. Christmas is strung across the rural landscape like tinfoil tinsel on a tree - a string of lights here, a manger scene there, native cedars everywhere.

Nothing elaborate in the decorations, but infinitely thorough, the way real people make merry.

Each time I stop, for gas or a Coca-Cola, people speak with an unstudied familiarity, as if we're all relatives, or certainly could be. They comment on the approaching cold front, the early darkness, the number of Wal-Mart Saturdays until Christmas. They welcome me, a stranger, yet one of them, passing through.

Nowhere are people as warm as in Mississippi. To one another. To outsiders. Nowhere do blacks and whites interact more, or with more genuine empathy. Nowhere are there more elected black public officials.

So did it come as any great surprise when Trent Lott said, in effect, that our nation would have been a better one if half the people in his home state were forever prevented from voting, drinking from public water fountains, using the library, sitting in the front of a Greyhound bus? When Trent, that poster boy for Oxford-cloth Republicans, in essence said that the South's long-ago resistance to integration - to change - was right?

No, it did not shock. Those who are shocked either are idiots or simply don't want the code broken. By code, I mean the verbal, political one Republicans have been using with impunity since Ronald Reagan rode the packed words to power.

Politicians don't talk like the George Wallace of my childhood, or at least the smarts one don't. They no longer cuss "outside agitators". They waggle a finger, instead, at the "ever-expanding federal bureaucracy".

They don't use racial epithets in 2002; they don't have to. They speak of "welfare cheats" or "welfare mothers" and get the same mileage.

The euphemistic pitch is so familiar, we don't even listen. The politicians speak of "conservatism" and "creeping socialism" and "traditional values" in articulating some vague manifesto for a party that has joined successfully the old silk-stocking Republicans, the rednecks, and the fundamentalists.

It's not just a wild coincidence that the white voters of the South - once staunchly, unanimously Democrats - became Republicans when blacks were given the vote. Just like whites deserted the public schools after they were integrated; just like whites deserted the cities for the suburbs when blacks were guaranteed decent housing. The whites fled the Democratic Party when blacks joined.

So, no, the fact that Trent Lott slips up and uses real words doesn't shock me. What shocks me is that so many pretend that he is the only politician who feels the way he feels. To portray Trent Lott as some Lone Ranger of Racism with his loyal sidekick, Mississippi, is a joke.

Where's the outrage over the fact that Strom Thurmond - with a political past so abhorrent Trent Lott can't safely mention it - is in the U.S. Senate? Where's the outcry over that?

Where's the anger over decades of Republican courtship of any racist or fool who can swell the party's ranks and win elections?

It never was about economics, the way the politicians pretended. At least not in the South. It was about race, and the Republican Party was the party that made the right status quo noises.

Now Democrats and Republicans alike are saying that maybe Trent Lott's is not the right face for the party of power in this, the good old U.S. of A. And I say, why not?

By last count, half of this nation's voters picked the party of Trent Lott. That would mean - being charitable - that one-quarter of the voters agree with Trent Lott on race. Another quarter of the voting population turns a blind eye, or deludes itself that Lott is an aberration, a diehard, mossback racist who wears a suit, not a sheet. Cuss Mississippi and assuage your own guilt.

The code has been broken, and that's mighty inconvenient for a lot of politicians. Meanwhile, the real people do their best to get along.