[Dialogue] Spong 1/23/08 Huckabee and Who the heck is God?

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

Thanks Dick, for passing along this profound analysis
of the origins of the change in political loyalties in
the South.  As a native Southerner it seems to me to
be right on target.  Thanks again.
Charles Hahn
--- KroegerD at aol.com wrote:

>  
> January 23, 2008 
> Governor Huckabee: A Second  Generation Evangelical
> Politician  
> 
> In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson managed to get
> through the Congress of the  
> United States a national Voting Rights Act. It was
> not an easy task since  
> Johnson had to maneuver the bill through a Senate
> controlled by old line  
> Southern Democrats still wedded to segregation. To
> achieve this victory, Hhe  
> employed his prodigious reputation for arm
> twisting., to achieve this victory.  
> Working primarily with Everett Dirksen of Illinois,
> the minority leader of the  
> Senate, Johnson separated the Republican
> conservatives from their negativity to  
> any law that would increase the power of the federal
> government; and working  
> with moderate and border state Democrats, he peeled
> away these traditional  
> "fellow travelers" from the hard core racism of the
> deep South. The final vote  
> in the Senate was 47-17 among the Democrats and 30-2
> among the Republicans. 
> This  tally indicated that the "no" votes did not
> even include all of the 
> senators  from the states that had once formed the
> Confederacy. It was a massive  
> achievement, signaling a new day for America that
> brought into full voting  
> citizenship vast numbers of heretofore
> disenfranchised black people.  
> Bill Moyers, who was at that time serving as
> Johnson's Chief of Staff,  
> entered the Oval Office to bring his congratulations
> to the President on this  
> victory, expecting to find him in a celebratory
> frame of mind. Instead, as  Moyers 
> relates in his memoirs, he found the President in a
> mood of abject  
> depression. "Bill," he said, "I have just handed the
> South to the Republican  Party for 
> the next fifty years." He was remarkably correct.  
> Racism had been chiseled deeply into the Southern
> character and was fixed  
> indelibly in the Southern soul by the ravages of the
> Civil War. When racism was  
> socially acceptable, it was quite overt. One has
> only to read the speeches of 
>  southern politicians prior to the Civil War or even
> prior to the Civil 
> Rights  revolution. When racism loses its aura of
> respectability, however, it 
> doesn't  disappear, it simply becomes covert. Code
> words are developed. "States' 
> Rights,"  for example," really means: "We believe
> the state has the right to 
> discriminate  without the interference of the
> Federal Government,." and "Strict  
> Constructionist Judges" really means judges who
> confuse constitutional 
> democracy  with monocracy and who will not extend
> constitutional rights to unpopular  
> minorities.  
> Johnson understood that newly enfranchised black
> voters would identify  
> themselves primarily with the Democratic Party,
> which would in turn mean that  the 
> old white southern establishment would inevitably
> preserve its covert racism  
> by becoming Republican. In Virginia, Mills Godwin,
> who was the Conservative  
> Democratic governor of Virginia from 1965-1969, was
> elected the Republican  
> Governor of Virginia in 1973. Strom Thurmond of
> South Carolina, Phil Graham of  
> Texas, Richard Shelby of Alabama and many others
> changed party allegiances  
> without sacrificing their seats in the Senate.
> Richard Nixon went to school on  
> Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful Southern strategy in
> 1964, adapting it in 1968 
> to  sweep what had once been the solid Democratic
> South. In the pre-Voting 
> Rights  Act era that solid Democratic South had
> rested on three political 
> foundations:  protecting white supremacy, keeping a
> strong military, (which was well 
> rewarded  by the location of numerous military bases
> in the South), and 
> supporting liberal  economic measures that would
> benefit the poor and middle class 
> white southern  voters. These three positions
> reflected the values of the South 
> that elected  them. First, by restricting black
> voters, segregation kept 
> political power in  the hands of the white
> establishment. ; sSecond, during the 
> period of slavery,  which was based on subjugating
> significant numbers of people, 
> Southerners  cultivated the military virtues,
> identifying them with chivalry 
> and good manners  (note the number of military
> schools in the South including 
> The Citadel in South  Carolina and VMI in Virginia),
> ). and tThird, the 
> poverty of the white South  made economic populism a
> political necessity. While the 
> value of Southern land  was considerable, this
> wealth was in the hands of a 
> relatively few people. As  long as Southern
> politicians could keep segregation 
> intact, they tended to  support the working class
> values of such liberal 
> Democratic presidents as  Woodrow Wilson, Franklin
> Roosevelt, Harry Truman and even 
> John F. Kennedy.  
> When segregation fell, however, and the Voting
> Rights Act of 1965 probably  
> more than anything else brought it down, Southern
> old line white Democratic  
> voters found themselves willing to abandon populism
> as the price of their  
> Republican identification. Racism always trumps
> bread and butter issues. Former  
> Democrats began to portray themselves as "Values
> Voters," to which whom the  
> National Republican leadership threw the emotional
> bones of making abortion a  
> major political issue, attaching it to the liberal
> breakdown in sexual  
> morality,; and by campaigning against homosexual
> people, who were, they said,  
> "threatening marriage and the family." In this
> manner the conservative  establishment 
> wedded the heretofore populist southern white voters
> with their  right wing, 
> wealth-oriented economic policies. This new
> political coalition  became so 
> powerful that only two Democrats could break the
> Republican control of  the White 
> House from 1968 to 2008. One of these two was a
> "born again" Georgia  
> Governor whose rise to power was helped by
> Watergate, and the second was a Bible  
> toting Arkansas Governor whose path to the White
> House was made easier by an  
> economic downturn.  
> The last Republican president in this era, George W.
> Bush, rode into power in 
>  2000 by cultivating evangelical voters quite
> overtly with his own "born 
> again"  story. He governed, however, as an economic
> conservative. The Bush tax 
> cuts did  not benefit the poor or the middle class.
> His lessening of restrictions 
> on big  business gave us the huge and expensive
> scandals in Enron, World Com 
> and Tyco of  the early 2000's and the housing sub
> prime market of today. His 
> military  adventures in Iraq made the cost of
> gasoline, health care and 
> education sky  rocket. The wealthy might have been
> well served by this 
> administration, but the  poor and middle classes
> came under heavy pressure. Next, religious 
> scandals tore  at the integrity of the "values"
> voter." In the Roman Catholic 
> Church it was  child abuse; and in evangelical
> circles, it featured the 
> bizarre sexual  escapades of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim
> and Tammy Faye Bakker, making 
> the use of  religious politics appear to be little
> more than cynical jargon. 
> Slowly but  surely the old political alliance of
> Southern evangelical whites and 
> the  Republican party of wealthy conservatives that
> Lyndon Johnson had rightly 
>  predicted in 1965, began to show signs of stress.
> It was waiting for a 
> candidate  who could see that "the right to life"
> does not stop at birth, but that 
> it is  important even for the children of
> evangelicals after birth to be 
> educated, to  have health care, to find jobs that
> have not been exported to Mexico, 
> India or  China. Even the specter of "gay marriage"
> did not seem so scary or 
> even so  partisan when a Republican congressman from
> Florida who was overtly 
> anti-gay was  revealed to have acted inappropriately
> with house pages, a 
> homosexual-hating  Republican senator from Idaho was
> caught soliciting homosexual 
> favors in a  public toilet and the ordained head of
> the largest Evangelical 
> Network in  America was discovered to have carried
> on a long term sexual 
> 
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