Ari Berman | The Nation

Texas Governor Rick Perry, left, speaks as former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney listen at the South Carolina Republican presidential candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, Monday, January 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, Pool)

Martin Luther King Day would have been a perfect occasion for the GOP presidential candidates to express their commitment to racial tolerance and diversity. Instead, just the opposite occurred at last night’s GOP debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Who needs a dog whistle when you’re in a state where the Confederate flag still flies atop the statehouse grounds?

This Republican field has been marked by questionable racial assertions, as my colleague Gary Younge recently noted. Rick Perry’s hunting at a camp called Niggerhead. Ron Paul’s publishing of scores of racist newsletters. Newt Gingrich’s calling Barack Obama the “food stamp president.” Rick Santorum’s saying “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

This racially inflammatory rhetoric was on full display last night, as candidate after candidate auditioned to be the next George Wallace. It started when debate moderator Juan Williams asked Perry about South Carolina’s restrictive voter ID law, which the Department of Justice found would disproportionately impact minority voters. Here’s the key exchange:

WILLIAMS: Governor Perry, last month the Department of Justice challenged South Carolina’s new law requiring registered voters to show state issued identification before they can vote. Governor Haley has pledged to fight the federal government all the way to the Supreme Court. You sided with the government.

[Applause]

WILLIAMS: Now, Governor Perry, are you suggesting on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day that the federal government has no business scrutinizing the voting laws of states where minorities were once denied the right to vote?

PERRY: I’m saying that the state of Texas is under assault by federal government. I’m saying also that South Carolina is at war with this federal government and with this administration.

Any segregationist governor could have uttered those very lines in the 1950s or 1960s.

Later in the debate, Williams asked Gingrich about his incendiary suggestions that black Americans should seek jobs, not food stamps, and that poor children should work as janitors. “Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?” Williams asked Gingrich.

Gingrich responded by saying that “New York City pays their janitors an absurd amount of money,” and that “only the elites despise earning money.” He also reiterated his claim that “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.” That statement is utterly lacking in context, failing to note that Congress expanded the food stamp program under George W. Bush and that the Great Recession forced many more people onto food stamps than in normal times.

The GOP’s race problem doesn’t pertain just to Perry and Gingrich. Romney also voiced his opposition to restoring voting rights to ex-felons, which disproportionately disenfranchises minority voters, and said he would veto passage of the DREAM Act, which would give the children of undocumented immigrants who attend college or serve in the military a path to citizenship.

The 2008 electorate was the most diverse in US history. But last night it sounded as if the GOP candidates were practically whistlin’ Dixie.

As the GOP presidential candidates stepped up their attacks over the past few days on Mitt Romney’s private equity career at Bain Capital, a new meme quickly emerged in the press: Romney was being “Swift-Boated.”

“Gingrich Swift Boats Romney,” wrote New York magazine. “Is Gingrich swift-boating Romney?” asked MSNBC’s Morning Joe. National Review coined a new phrase: “Romney-Boating.”

It’s an absurd comparison. Criticism of Romney’s business career is nothing like the attacks made by the Orwellian-named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against John Kerry’s combat record in Vietnam. The entire Swift Boat campaign against Kerry was a monstrous lie. The scrutiny of Romney’s Bain tenure, on the other hand, is grounded in the truth.

The media’s Romney-Kerry comparison is based on a new documentary produced by an ex-Romney staffer and released by a Gingrich-aligned Super PAC. I haven’t seen the entire twenty-seven-minute film (only a Gingrich Super PAC would release such a long-winded attack documentary), just the trailer. While it’s certainly propagandistic, hyperbolic and partisan, the central premise of the film is rooted in reporting done by the likes of Reuters, Bloomberg News, Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and many other large mainstream publications. These reports found that Bain, under Romney’s leadership, closed plants, downsized companies and outsourced jobs in order to maximize profits for the consulting firm and its shareholders.

Will the film tell the full story about Bain Capital? Doubtful. There’s more gray than black and white to most stories. Bain is a very good at what it does. But Romney did profit, at times, from other people’s misery. The Wall Street Journal found that 22 percent of the companies Bain invested with during Romney’s tenure “either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.” To suggest precisely that is not “Swift Boating.” It’s the truth.

Moreover, Romney has left himself open to attacks on this front by consistently exaggerating his business record, first claiming he created 10,000 jobs at Bain while running against Ted Kennedy in 1994 and now alleging he created 100,000 net jobs at the company during his tenure, which fact-checkers at the Washington Post, the New York Times and AP have debunked. The person guiltiest of distorting Romney’s record is Romney himself

The Swift Boat campaign against Kerry was far more odious than the Bain-related critique of Romney. Let’s remember that the Swift Boat vets said that John Kerry did not earn his Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, had made "phony war crimes charges…exaggerated claims about his own service in Vietnam…and deliberate misrepresentations of the nature and effectiveness of Swift boat operations”—all of which was completely untrue. As the LA Times wrote, “These charges against John Kerry are false."

In 2004, much of the media failed to clearly denounce the Swift Boat ads. Today, the danger is that they’ll draw a false equivalence between the outrageous attacks on Kerry’s service and legitimate questions about Romney’s business career. 

Tomorrow Attorney General Eric Holder will gave a major speech on voting rights at the LBJ presidential library in Austin. According to the library, “Holder will discuss the importance of ensuring equal access to the ballot box and strengthening America's long tradition of expanding the franchise.”

Holder’s speech could not come at a more critical time. Over the last year we’ve witnessed an unprecedented GOP war on voting, with a dozen Republican governors and state legislators passing laws to restrict voter registration drives, require birth certificates to register to vote, curtail early voting, mandate government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot and disenfranchise ex-felons who’ve served their time. The Brennan Center for Justice has estimated that “these new laws could make it significantly harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012,” and notes that “these new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities.”

On Saturday, in conjunction with UN Human Rights Day, thousands of activists and concerned citizens in New York City held a march and rally to protest these restrictive new laws. The march began outside the New York headquarters of the Koch brothers, who have given more than $1 million to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the shadowy conservative advocacy group that has masterminded the push for new voter ID requirements this year. Protesters held signs that read “Koch Bros & The 1%: Undermining Democracy.”

The march then continued to the UN for a rally with civil rights leaders, good-government activists and voting rights experts. One organizer told me that 20,000–25,000 people participated in the march, which, if true, would be a very good turnout on a chilly December morning. (The AP, on the other hand, said that “hundreds” protested, though the numbers seemed significantly larger to me). Groups sponsoring the march/rally included the NAACP, SEIU1199 and the United Federation of Teachers.

The purpose of the march was both practical and symbolic. “The march on Saturday was an indication that Americans will not go backwards,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project. “We will keep up the momentum to end voter suppression by taking to the streets, to the legislatures and to the courts. We won't be silenced by those who want to undermine democracy.”

The Advancement Project has helped gather 120,000 signatures asking the Justice Department “to oppose any discriminatory laws that will disenfranchise voters.” The Justice Department has that authority under the Voting Rights Act. DOJ has sent pointed questions to states like Texas and South Carolina about their new laws, but we still don’t know how aggressively they will enforce the existing laws on the books. Perhaps Holder’s speech tomorrow will shed some light.

“Occupy A Voting Booth,” read one sign I spotted on Saturday. Many of the speakers echoed that theme. While Occupy Wall Street is rightly fighting for systemic change in a broken political system, the demonstrators on Saturday are leading a struggle to protect the most basic of political rights—the right to vote. Because of the new GOP laws, Bob Fertik of Democrats.com recently told me, voting itself has become an act of resistance.

President Barack Obama speaks about the economy, Tuesday, December 6, 2011, at Osawatomie High School in Osawatomie, Kansas. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

It’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed our country’s political conversation. But if you want to know exactly how the Occupy movement has impacted the debate in Washington, read Barack Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, today.

For much of 2011, Obama’s speeches were all about the deficit. Today the central theme of his speech was income inequality—and how this mounting problem weakens our economy and our democracy. At long last, the president sounded like he was channeling his inner Elizabeth Warren.

Obama’s pivot away from austerity orthodoxy and toward public investment began with his jobs speech in September, but he’s subsequently sharpened his language and focus in recent months in response to pressure from Occupy Wall Street. He’s now tackling issues of basic fairness and attacking the GOP’s brand of “your-on-your-own economics” in a much more direct way. His nod to Teddy Roosevelt, who delivered his “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie in 1910, could not have come at a more appropriate time. Here’s the relevant section:

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes—especially for the wealthy—our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, they argue, that’s the price of liberty.

It’s a simple theory—one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: it doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.

Remember that in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history, and what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class—things like education and infrastructure; science and technology; Medicare and Social Security.

Remember that in those years, thanks to some of the same folks who are running Congress now, we had weak regulation and little oversight, and what did that get us? Insurance companies that jacked up people’s premiums with impunity, and denied care to the patients who were sick. Mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn’t afford. A financial sector where irresponsibility and lack of basic oversight nearly destroyed our entire economy.

We simply cannot return to this brand of your-on-your-own economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country. We know that it doesn’t result in a strong economy. It results in an economy that invests too little in its people and its future. It doesn’t result in a prosperity that trickles down. It results in a prosperity that’s enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens.

Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top one percent has gone up by more than 250 percent, to $1.2 million per year. For the top one hundredth of one percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about thirty times more than his or her workers now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent.

This kind of inequality—a level we haven’t seen since the Great Depression—hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy, from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity—that’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars they made. It’s also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. And it leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them—that our elected representatives aren’t looking out for the interests of most Americans.

More fundamentally, this kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try. We tell people that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, hard work can get you into the middle class; and that your children will have the chance to do even better than you. That’s why immigrants from around the world flocked to our shores.

And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk. A few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance fell to around 40 percent. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a one-in-three chance of making it to the middle class.

It’s heartbreaking enough that there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal. But the idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for.

You’re likely to hear elements of this speech over and over as the campaign heats up, as the Obama campaign attempts to stand with the 99 percent and paint Gingrich or Romney as core defenders of the 1 percent. None other than Chuck Schumer, one of the senators who represents Wall Street, told Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent that Democrats would focus on income inequality “like a laser” in 2012.

That will entail, however, a shift not only in rhetoric, but also in policy for a party and president that has too often been seen as prioritizing Wall Street over Main Street. Nor is it realistic to think that the Obama campaign will suddenly win over disaffected former supporters with a series of speeches. Indeed, Occupy Wall Street is aimed as much at the president and the rigged political system in Washington as it is at the nation’s largest banks. As one OWS leader told New York magazine: “These [protesters] aren’t out here because they’re offended that they haven’t been spoken to nicely. They’re out here because they owe shitloads of money in student-loan debt and can’t find a job. Or they can’t afford their mortgage. And if Obama thinks that they’re gonna be able to divert this energy by talking about doing something, he’s got another think coming.”

To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, Obama now needs to prove to the movement that he has more to offer them, and the country, than just words. Still, the populist moment captured by Occupy Wall Street provides an opening for the president as well. It’s still an open question whether he’ll end up on the right or the wrong side of this movement. But today Obama took an important step in Occupy’s direction.