Trump is - Thankfully - Driving Away Suburban Voters

Across America - Virginia is a perfect example - suburban area voters are rejecting the racism, far right religious extremism, and reactionary policies that now define the Republican Party under Donald Trump.  Neither Trump nor the base of the GOP - white supremacists and Christofascists - seem to have gotten the message.  Hence, the primary defeat in Virginia's 5th congressional district of a Republican likely to have won reelection by an extremist with ties to Liberty University who may well lose to his Democrat opponent in November.  At the national level Trump is doubling down on precisely the things that alienate suburban voters in the effort to retain the loyalty of his knuckle dragging, Klan supporting base.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the situation which hopefully proves fatal to Trump's reelection hopes.  Here are excerpts:

In 2016, Trump won the overall suburban vote by five percentage points, and those votes were largely responsible for his narrow victory in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The campaign sent surrogates including Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who became a top aide in his White House, and Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, to connect with suburban voters such as white women and working moms who were uncomfortable with Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival.

But Trump’s responses to several of today’s most significant issues in the past week are making the already unpopular president less popular with these voters.

1. Despite increases in reported coronavirus cases — so severe in some states that their leaders have ordered some shutdowns again — Trump is pressuring schools to reopen this fall.

2. While most Americans believe that monuments honoring Confederate soldiers who fought to keep black people enslaved should be removed, Trump does not — and has even used racist slurs to attack his political opponents on the issue.

3. Days after speaking near Mount Rushmore — a monument to presidents carved on a mountain that some Native American tribes consider sacred — Trump criticized athletic teams that are changing their names and mascots from those deemed racist toward Native Americans.

[Trump’s] eagerness to send students back to school as soon as possible seems more rooted in his desire to give the impression that the pandemic is under control as opposed to data supporting that things are actually improving. That could hurt him with suburban voters — and particularly the women and mothers who supported him in the past.

And while Trump opposes removing Confederate memorials — a position he also took in August 2017 when he defended white nationalists who marched to preserve the monuments — most Americans do not. I previously reported that most voters — 52 percent — support removing Confederate statues from public spaces around the country, according to a June Quinnipiac University poll, a significant increase in support since August 2017, when fewer than 40 percent of voters supported removing such statues.

Among the Americans who feel uncomfortable with Trump’s position on racial issues are suburban voters — and that can have real ramifications for November. Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, wrote in The Washington Post last week:

In the wake of recent racial unrest, Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has opened a commanding 25-point lead over Trump in the suburbs. Two-thirds of Americans say the president has made racial tensions worse since the killing of Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. Trump’s uncompromising rhetoric and retweets are driving away swing voters who don’t want to be associated with a senior citizen shouting “white power!”

The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll shows the president receiving about a third of the suburban vote — a significant decline from the nearly 50 percent of support he received in 2016. With several months left before the election, that number could drop more, and perhaps is likely to if Trump continues to address these issues in the same way. And all indicators suggest that he will. . . . . it will be very difficult for him to win the election if he continues to take stances on issues that suburban voters oppose.

One can only hope Trump continues to drive away suburban voters.

Vichy Republicans Fear the Consequences of Self-Prostitution to Trump

The Republican Party I grew up in and once supported is dead and gone.  In its place is a party that rejects science and education, embraces white supremacy and has completely prostituted itself to Donald Trump and the ugliest elements of his base of support, namely openly racist whites and white evangelicals (although at times it is difficult to differentiate the latter the former).  Now with Trump's support seemingly eroding and a majority of Americans tiring of Trump's non-stop racism,  congressional Republicans, especially those in the Senate fear that they may be in for a much deserved reckoning come November.  As a former Republican I have zero sympathy for today's Republicans who now disingenuously seek to pretend they find Trump's white nationalism distastefully.  They are little better than the Vichy French who collaborated with the Nazi's in occupied France. Like the Vichy French, these Republicans sold their souls for short term power and need to pay a high price.  A long piece in the Washington Post looks at this self-made crisis for Republicans.  Here are highlights:

President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.

Although amplifying racism and stoking culture wars have been mainstays of Trump’s public identity for decades, they have been particularly pronounced this summer as [Trump] the president has reacted to the national reckoning over systemic discrimination by seeking to weaponize the anger and resentment of some white Americans for his own political gain.

Trump has left little doubt through his utterances the past few weeks that he sees himself not only as the Republican standard-bearer but as leader of a modern grievance movement animated by civic strife and marked by calls for “white power,” . . . . Trump put his strategy to resuscitate his troubled reelection campaign by galvanizing white supporters on display Friday night under the chiseled granite gaze of four past presidents memorialized in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He celebrated Independence Day with a dystopian speech in which he excoriated racial justice protesters as “evil” representatives of a “new far-left fascism” whose ultimate goal is “the end of America.”

Over the years, some Republicans have struggled to navigate Trump’s race baiting and, at times, outright racism, while others have rallied behind him. Bursts of indignation and frustration come and go but have never resulted in a complete GOP break with the president. Trump’s recent moves are again putting Republican officeholders onto risky political terrain.

On Friday night at Mount Rushmore, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), a member of the party’s leadership, and other top Republicans were seen applauding as Trump spoke.

Trump’s repeated championing of monuments, memorials and military bases honoring Confederate leaders has run up against the tide of modernity and a weary electorate that polls show overwhelmingly support the Black Lives Matter movement — a slogan that Trump said would be “a symbol of hate” if painted on Fifth Avenue in New York.

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans fret — mostly privately, to avoid his [Trump's] wrath — that Trump’s fixation on racial and other cultural issues leaves their party running against the currents of change. Coupled with the coronavirus pandemic and related economic crisis, these Republicans fear he is not only seriously impairing his reelection chances but also jeopardizing the GOP Senate majority and its strength in the House. . . .  “The problem is this is no longer just Trump’s Twitter feed. It’s expanded to the podium, and that makes it more and more difficult for these campaigns.”

Racial animus and toxicity were woven throughout Trump’s 2016 campaign. Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama White House political director who is now president of the Open Society Foundations, credited Trump with understanding “that there is a constituency — a deep constituency, a solid constituency, a resolute constituency — in the electorate for these views.”

The difference now, four years later, Gaspard argued, is that the sentiments of many Americans about justice and disparity appear to have evolved.

Former Ohio governor John Kasich, a Republican who ran against Trump in 2016, said the GOP’s muted and scattered response to the president on race this week underscores how the party is “in decline” and has become a vessel for Trumpism — even as polls show Trump losing ground among seniors and white evangelicals and trailing Biden in every key battleground state. 

“They coddled this guy the whole time and now it’s like some rats are jumping off of the sinking ship. It’s just a little late,” Kasich said. “It’s left this nation with a crescendo of hate not only between politicians but between citizens. . . . It started with Charlottesville and people remained silent then, and we find ourselves in this position now.”

Kasich added, “I’m glad to see some of these Republicans moving the other way but it reminds me of Vichy France where they said, ‘Well, I never had anything to do with that,’ ” a reference to the French government that continued during Nazi occupation in the 1940s. 

“Trump is pretty predictable with his racism and his racialized take on things,” Wright Rigueur said. “Every once in a while the Trump administration and campaign have flashes of what look like sincere outreach efforts to various racial communities. . . . But that’s the part that’s insincere, and he always circles back to his core, and it renders all of this other stuff around the economy and criminal justice reform completely invalid because there’s no way of ignoring the central component of his campaign.”

Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on race and politics, said Trump’s latest outbursts are the culmination of his nearly decade-long effort to remake the GOP in his own image, going back to his racist “birther” attacks on Obama’s credentials and love of country.

Trump’s racism, she said, “is not subtle at all. Every step he takes, every comment about human beings, murders or killings, he can’t hold back. Even as Mississippi and other parts of the country remove Confederate symbols, he goes in the opposite direction as hard as he can.”

Some senators and their advisers believe they must expand their vote share beyond Trump’s base to win reelection.

“[Trump's] The president’s base is locked in. They love him, they’re going to turn out and they’re going to vote for him,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres said. “The problem is that the base is not enough to win. You can make a case that protecting Confederate monuments is very popular among at least a portion of his base, but it does nothing to expand the coalition, and that’s the imperative at the moment and will be going forward if the party hopes to govern.”

Trump has not made it easy for embattled Republicans to duck him. He reaffirmed Tuesday that he would veto this year’s proposed $740 billion annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases named for Confederate military leaders — an amendment that has bipartisan support. 

Trump’s approach has deep roots in Republican politics. Beginning with the violent opposition among some white voters to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Richard Nixon and other Republican politicians appealed to white voters — especially in the South — with calls for “law and order” and vows to defend states’ rights as the federal government enforced the new laws.

Most congressional Republicans in challenging races this year have long been mute on Trump’s racist comments, or they have cast them as unhelpful or combative but not racist — a method that has largely helped them avoid Trump’s anger.

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who has done extensive research on racial divisions, argued that Trump is likely to continue to play to “white resentment politics” because it is the only strategy that could stave off further erosion of his support.

“Without white resentment, there is no rationale for Donald Trump,” Belcher said. “Without that, what reason do his supporters have to be with Donald Trump if he’s not going to be your tribal strong man? He started there and will end there.”

Donald Trump: Last President of the Confederacy

As more and more states and cities begin to finally recognize Confederate monuments - most, like those erected in Richmond fifty or more years after the end of the Civil War - for what they were meant to be, a message to blacks that whites were once again in charge and that blacks were again subjugated, die hard racists are foaming at the mouth.  These monuments all appeared as Southern states (sadly Virginia lead the way) formally ended Reconstruction and fully implemented the Jim Crow era.  As a piece in History notes, states implemented :black codes:

Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes.

In addition, monuments to the Confederacy and the effort to romanticize the "Lost Cause" grew - Virginia has the most Confederate monuments of any Southern state. History also notes the timing of these memorials:

Most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s end in 1865. During that time, commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died  . . . . “Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments,” he says. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s. In contrast to the earlier memorials that mourned dead soldiers, these monuments tended to glorify leaders of the Confederacy . . . 

Given this history, blacks have good reason to find the monuments offensive.  It also explains why they are so loved by white supremacists, including the current occupant of the White House who continues to speak out against their removal and to lash out against NASCAR's decision to ban confederate flags from its events.  A a column in the Washington Post looks at Trump's racism and efforts to please white supremacists (and white Christofascists).  Here are column highlights:

It should have happened 155 years ago, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but maybe — just maybe — the Civil War is finally coming to an end. And perhaps Donald Trump, not Jefferson Davis, will go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy.

Symbols like flags and monuments matter, because what they symbolize is our vision of ourselves as a nation: the heroes, battles, movements, sacrifices and ideals we honor. So when I see multiracial crowds toppling the statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians, when I see respected military leaders arguing that Army posts should no longer bear the names of Confederate generals, when I see NASCAR banning displays of the Confederate battle flag at its races — witnessing all of this, I let hope triumph over experience and allow myself to imagine that this may indeed be a transformational moment.

Like the Civil War itself, “Lost Cause” symbology is simply and entirely about white supremacy. It has nothing to do with “heritage” or “tradition” or any such gauzy nonsense. The heavily armed “liberate Michigan” mob that invaded the statehouse in Lansing, egged on by President Trump, had no historical reason to be waving the Confederate flag.

Lee’s surrender ended nothing, because the nation did not even begin to grapple with white supremacy. Reconstruction was strangled in its infancy; true racial reconciliation was never even attempted. The statue of Davis in Richmond, brought down by protesters Wednesday night, was not erected until 1907. Like almost all of the Lost Cause monuments, it was built during the revanchist era, when Southern whites were celebrating their reestablished dominance over African Americans via repressive Jim Crow laws and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.

Many recall that the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse was taken down in 2015 following the massacre of nine African American worshipers by a white supremacist at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. Few realize that the racist flag had been installed at the statehouse not in 1861 but a century later, in 1961, when black South Carolinians like my parents were agitating for the right to vote.

The killing of Floyd has provoked a national moment of reckoning with police violence and white supremacy. But the position of the Trump administration is that systemic racism does not even exist — that our unexamined and unaddressed racial problems all come down to a few “bad apples” here and there.

Trump has used this moment to side with Lost Cause white supremacy. His all-caps tweets for “LAW & ORDER” sound like George Wallace when he was governor of Alabama; his demand for a militarized response to the protests reminds me of Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who attacked nonviolent civil rights protesters with water hoses and vicious dogs.

When it was reported that high-ranking Army officials are open to stripping the names of Confederate generals from military posts such as Fort Bragg, Fort Benning and Fort Hood, Trump reacted instantly. He tweeted Wednesday that he “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”

He may be historically ignorant enough not to know that the generals in question were traitors as famous for the battles they lost as for any of their triumphs; that ultimate victory went to the Union, not the Confederacy; and that the whole point of the rebellion was to deny freedom to African Americans. Or he may know these facts but believe his political base doesn’t.

NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. If there is one sporting venue that Trump might think of as a safe space, it would be a NASCAR race — until now. Heck, I might even go watch a race when the pandemic ends.

Trump must be bewildered. Unsubtle appeals to racial animus (remember his “birther” lies) have always worked for him in the past, but now he seems to be flailing. If it turns out that the Lost Cause is finally, truly lost, then so is the president who made himself its champion.

Ed Gillespie Panders to White Nationalists, Underscores Unfitness for Office

As predicted shortly after the Virginia GOP primary in June, 2017, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is making a hard play at prostituting himself to white nationalists and racists in the Virginia Republican Party base who voted for Corey Stewart and nearly sent Gillespie to defeat.  The same effort also serves to pander to those in the Virginia GOP base who voted for Der Trumpenführer, an individual who remains highly unpopular in the vote rich urban crescent that extends from the Northern Virginia DC suburbs through Richmond and to Hampton Roads.  The catch 22 for Gillespie is the reality that the more he makes himself the candidate of the white supremacist/Christian right extremists of the GOP base, the more he underscores why he is abhorrent to the vote rich urban crescent and unfit for office.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Gillespie's telling efforts at self-prostitution to what I view as "white trash," Neo-fascists and open racists.  Here are excerpts:

The Post reports:

Ed Gillespie hired a blunt-spoken veteran of Donald Trump’s campaign and sharpened his rhetoric on Confederate monuments in recent days, as the establishment Republican running for Virginia governor seeks to win over Trump voters.

This is as repulsive as it is predictable. The former lobbyist and former adviser to President George W. Bush had already hardened his stance on immigration to keep up with Trump Republicans. Then came his near-loss in the GOP primary to Corey A. Stewart, who beat the drum (with Morgan’s help) on the Confederate statue issue. The politically expedient move, Gillespie seems to have concluded, is to nail down his base and make certain those Stewart voters turn out in November.

Expedient does not mean smart, however. . . . . The notion that he’s really a Corey Stewart Republican — as he tries to campaign on a forward-looking economic agenda — is going to give voters whiplash.

Moreover, Republicans’ problem in Virginia in statewide races is that they are increasingly out of step with the moderate voters, white-collar workers, government employees and minorities who populate Northern Virginia counties. That population now dwarfs GOP strongholds in the southern and western parts of the state. Republican candidates who run up huge deficits in votes in Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and Arlington counties simply cannot make up the votes elsewhere. That’s why McDonnell was the last Republican to win a statewide race.

Now Gillespie is giving those Northern Virginia voters — Republicans included — every reason to run the other way. They do not think of themselves as sons and daughters of the South; they are socially liberal or moderate and fully engaged in the information economy. Gillespie is making himself into a political Neanderthal from their perspective.

No wonder Virginia’s state Democratic Party leaped at the chance to bash Gillespie. Kevin Donohoe, Democratic Party of Virginia spokesman, told me, “For eighteen days, Ed Gillespie has refused to condemn Donald Trump’s shameful reaction to the violence in Charlottesville. Now, Gillespie is proving just how willing he is to pander to Corey Stewart extremists by trying to fundraise off of this issue.” 

This in a nutshell is the story of the GOP in Virginia and the country at large. Too afraid to oppose race-baiters and white-grievance mongers such as Trump, they adopt a “If you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. In doing so, they forfeit their own integrity and make the entire party offensive to everyone else — even to those who might embrace some of their economic positions. If Trump can turn Ed Gillespie into a Confederate flag-waver, then the GOP really has lost any claim to be the Party of Lincoln.

Just as disgusting is GOP Attorney General candidate John Adams who is vitriolically anti-LGBT, a champion of special rights for Christofascists and who has made a career out of representing extremists, the wealthy and large corporations at the expense of average citizens.  Don't be fooled by Adams' feigned moderation or wearing of religion on his sleeve. 

Charlottesville and Trump Reshape Virginia Gubernatorial Race

Last week I wrote about Ed Gillespie's effort to hoodwink Virginia voters into believing that a vote for him would not be a vote for the Trump/Republican Party extremist, white supremacist agenda.   The reality is that between the need to court Corey Stewart supporters (see below) and swear obedience to The Family Foundation, Gillespie's agenda if elected would be far different than what his plain vanilla, specifics free campaign effort offers. 

In contrast, Ralph Northam who I have known for over 10 years is the real deal.  When Northam says something, it is after thoughtful consideration and it is genuine rather than what seems expedient at the moment.  The contrast between Northam and Gillespie could not be more stark.  Gillespie is basically a would be slick used car salesman, while Northam is a thoughtful veteran and physician.

Thankfully, the horrors that unfolded in Charlottesville, Trump's embrace of white supremacists and the rantings of Corey Stewart - a Minnesota transplant running on a pro-Confederate, white supremacist platform who almost defeated Gillespie in the GOP gubernatorial primary  and who says he will challenge Senator Tim Kaine - will continue to make life difficult for Gillespie.  Moreover,  as he continues to refuse to condemn Trump (who is VERY unpopular in Virginia's urban crescent), Gillespie unwittingly assists Democrat candidate  Ralph Northam.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the disingenuous balancing act that Gillespie is trying to maintain. 

The bloody white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., has thrust race and history to the forefront of this year’s campaign for governor in Virginia, a tradition-bound state whose identity has always been rooted in a past that is as proud for some residents as it is painful for others.

The gubernatorial race in this swing state was already set to be the next big test of the nation’s politics, its results inevitably to be read as a harbinger for the 2018 midterm elections and President Trump’s fate. But the events last weekend in one of its historical centers — in the city that Thomas Jefferson called home and on the university campus that he designed and founded — ensure that the nation’s highest-profile campaign this fall will also be fought in part along the highly combustible lines of racial politics.

With Mr. Trump defending Confederate statues and his former top strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, openly inviting Democrats to continue focusing on the issue of removing monuments, the president will loom large over the commonwealth in November.

In the aftermath of last weekend’s violence, Lt. Gov. Ralph S. Northam, the Democratic nominee for governor, has firmed up his call to take down Confederate monuments in the state where much of the Civil War was fought and where so many Confederate leaders, now memorialized in marble, emerged. We have to be sensitive to all people’s feelings and represent all Virginians,” he said, criticizing his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, for not “denouncing the president” by name after Mr. Trump asserted that there were good people marching alongside Nazi sympathizers and Klansmen last weekend.

Yet Mr. Northam has little appetite to make Virginia’s counties and cities uproot their memorials to the Confederacy and says the decision should remain up to the localities.
Mr. Gillespie also believes local communities should make that decision. . . . . “Rather than glorifying their objects, the statues should be instructional,” Mr. Gillespie said in a lengthy written statement earlier in the week.

In an illustration of this state’s complicated politics, and the expectations of each party’s base, it is Mr. Northam, the descendant of slaveholders and a product of Virginia’s rural eastern shore, who is calling for the statues to come down, while Mr. Gillespie, a New Jersey native who moved to Northern Virginia after establishing a political career in Washington, is more closely aligned with the old guard.

Democrats, while encouraged about having a tool to mobilize black voters in an off-year election, are cognizant of national polling that shows opposition to removing Confederate monuments is bipartisan. They also fear that conservative whites may come out in higher numbers to register their opposition.

Yet many Republicans are equally wary about running a gubernatorial campaign with race as a centerpiece. Virginia is an increasingly progressive state, and in an election that is bound to become nationalized, evading Mr. Trump, a deeply unpopular figure in the most vote-rich regions here, would be all but impossible for Mr. Gillespie under those circumstances.

“It puts Ed in a tough spot,” said State Delegate David Albo, a veteran Republican legislator, alluding to the pressure Mr. Gillespie is under to distance himself from the president.  Or as Representative A. Donald McEachin, Democrat of Virginia, put it: “We have the gift that keeps on giving in Donald Trump.

Compounding Mr. Gillespie’s challenge, Mr. Trump is not the only incendiary Republican looming over this campaign.

Corey Stewart, who in June narrowly lost the nomination for governor after making the statues a central part of his platform, has already started his 2018 bid for the seat held by Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat. Mr. Stewart, a Minnesotan by birth, is using that bullhorn to complain that Mr. Gillespie is being overly timid on the matter of Virginia’s Confederate history.

“He’s like some dainty old lady who doesn’t want to get her hands dirty,” said Mr. Stewart of his former rival, adding: “If he continues to try to stay above the monuments’ debate he will lose the election.”

The searing images of torches and mayhem on the University of Virginia’s iconic lawn and murder in the community that Mr. Jefferson made his home have left many in this state reeling, furious that a group of bigots from beyond the state’s borders have stained a place they revere.

Yet many African-Americans have long since grown tired of such prominent Confederate iconography as the horse-bound generals on pedestals who loom over Monument Avenue in Richmond, the state capital and former capital of the Confederacy.

Virginia effectively contains the political and social equivalent of Alabama and New Jersey within its borders, and its politics reflect this dichotomy. The affluent and educated urban crescent that stretches from the Washington suburbs down to Richmond and on to Virginia Beach votes differently from the poorer and more rural areas in much of the state’s south and west.

And this Balkanization increasingly shapes state politics as much as Virginia’s presidential preferences (it has supported the Democratic nominee in each of the last three elections). There are increasingly few Northern Virginia Republicans elected and rural Democrats such as Mr. Deeds, have become just as scarce.

Many in the political middle here fault Mr. Trump for effectively weaponizing the conversation.

“We need a rational debate, but I’m afraid the emotion of the moment after what Trump did just destroyed the opportunity for that discussion,” said Mr. Deeds, who did not criticize Mr. Northam but made clear he thinks localities should be free to decide the monument issue.

Yet much like the aftermath of the 2015 rampage by a white supremacist in a South Carolina black church, there is an impulse in Virginia to take a tangible step toward healing.

“This state is no longer a history lesson suspended in animation,” Mr. Sabato said. “This was a disaster for Virginia, and people want to put a period on it.”

Ed Gillespie - Trump's Mini Me?

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie has been working hard to dupe Virginia voters into believing that he is a moderate who will not follow in the policy footsteps of Donald Trump, head of the Republican Party nationally.  To accomplish this message of trickery and deceit, Gillespie has adopted a campaign website that is little more than vague generalities and a tired rehashing of GOP from 30 years ago.  He offers nothing new.  Worse yet, he is striving to hide the reality that, if elected, he will (i) slavishly follow the culture war dictates of The Family Foundation, Virginia's leading hate group with strong historical ties to white supremacy, and (ii) pander to the near 50% of the GOP electorate that voted for Corey Stewart who campaigned on a racist/pro-Confederacy platform.    A piece in the Washington Post looks at how Der Trumpenführer is making things more difficult for Gillespie to hide the toxicity he would bring to the governor's mansion.  Here are highlights:

Republican Ed Gillespie has been fighting to keep the focus of his campaign for Virginia governor on state issues and away from President Trump.

That task grew more challenging this week after Trump defended some of the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville and bashed efforts to remove Confederate statues — directly injecting national politics into the Virginia governor’s race.

Gillespie, a longtime GOP operative and former Republican National Committee chairman, repeatedly said this week there’s no moral equivalence between white nationalists and the counterprotesters who clashed with them in Charlottesville.

The GOP candidate tweeted that the views of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville “have no redeeming value whatsoever. Simple as that” — without ever mentioning the president.

While Trump is highly unpopular in Virginia, and lost the state by five points to Hillary Clinton last year, Gillespie needs support from some Trump voters in November if he is to beat Democrat Ralph Northam, who has a slight lead on Gillespie in recent polls.

“Gillespie seems to be faced with one hurdle after another that Trump is actually placing in front of him in Virginia,” said Bob Holsworth, a retired Virginia Commonwealth University professor and longtime observer of state politics. “In each of these hurdles, he is trying not to directly criticize Trump, but to significantly distance himself in some fashion from Trump. That’s quite a tightrope to walk.”

Northam, and groups supporting him, have seized on Gillespie’s “silence” about Trump.  “It’s disappointing to see that my opponent won’t stand up to the president when he’s so clearly been wrong,” said Northam, the state’s lieutenant governor, in an interview. “The leader of our country needs to stand up to the white supremacists and say, ‘No more, stop it, go home and go back.’ Ed Gillespie needs to tell President Trump the same thing.” Vice President Pence abruptly canceled two political appearances he was scheduled to make in Virginia with Gillespie on Saturday; aides said he needed to keep his weekend flexible.

Those cancellations may ease optics for Gillespie, whose campaign declined to comment Thursday about Trump but indirectly criticized the president’s remark that there were “fine people” in the white nationalist rally.

One Republican operative unaffiliated with the Gillespie campaign said it would be a mistake for the candidate to talk about Trump. “I don’t think Ed is going to play the game of commenting on what Trump says or doesn’t say because if he does, my God, that’s the only thing he’ll answer for between now and the election,” said the operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about strategy. Gillespie is trying to stake out a middle ground: He opposes the removal of Confederate statues but says historical context should be added.

His efforts are complicated by Corey A. Stewart, who came within one percentage point of beating Gillespie for the GOP nomination in June by making the preservation of Virginia’s Confederate heritage a signature issue.

Stewart, who has launched a campaign to challenge U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D) with a similar strategy, appeared in a combative interview Thursday on CNN in which he repeatedly denounced the “violent left” and criticized Republicans for being too apologetic after Charlottesville for fear of being branded racists.
 “I can only imagine Gillespie’s people would love to pay Corey Stewart to go away, have a vacation on a Caribbean island,” Kidd said.

Again, voters should not be fooled by Gillespie's mealy mouthed dance shuffles.  The Virginia GOP nowadays stands for white supremacy, the disenfranchisement of minorities and the Christofascists agenda of The Family Foundation.  This reality needs to be exposed and Gillespie needs to be forced to take a stand.  He does not get to have it both ways.

The Real Story Behind All Those Confederate Statues

Before I continue, let me disclose for the record, that I have my own Confederate ancestors through my maternal grandmother, a New Orleans belle in her youth.  Not only were some of these family members of the past in the Confederate army (I would qualify for membership in the sons of Confederate Veterans if I were ever to apply, which I won't), but one was even a prisoner held in a Union prison camp in Michigan for a period of time.  No one still living can comment on whether any of these ancestors were slave owners, but there is a good chance that they were. 

I have read a great deal about the Civil War and the Southern effort to undo Reconstruction's empowerment of former slaves.  Sadly, Virginia - which has so often been on the wrong side of history- was a leader in this effort.  Thus, I am well aware of the horrible things done after Reconstruction ended and whites regained virtual total political, social, and economic control.  Knowing the "real history" of the Old South and the Jim Crow era, there is no way I can support the Trump/Pence and alt-right effort to bring back the Jim Crow era and to exalt white privilege (no moral person can).  I am also cognizant of the fact that the Confederate monuments now embroiled in controversy in Charlottesville and elsewhere were for the most part erected when Jim Crow laws were reaching their pinnacle.  Their purpose?  To intimidate blacks and to send the message that white privilege was untouchable.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at this reality.  Here are highlights:

[A]ll the way to 1890 there were very few statues or monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders.

[Here's an] oversimplified summary:

1861-1865: Civil War.
1865-1875: Reconstruction Era.
1875-1895: Reconstruction Era ends. Blacks are steadily disenfranchised, allowing Southern whites to enact Jim Crow laws. In 1896, Jim Crow is cemented into place when the Supreme Court rules it constitutional.
1895-1915: With blacks disenfranchised and Jim Crow laws safely in place, Southern whites begin a campaign of terror against blacks. Lynchings skyrocket, the KKK becomes resurgent, and whites begin building Confederate statues and monuments in large numbers.
1915-1955: Jim Crow reigns safely throughout the South.
1955-1970: The Civil Rights era starts after the Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that Jim Crow laws are unconstitutional. Southern whites mount massive and violent resistance, and start putting up Confederate monuments again.

Yes, these monuments were put up to honor Confederate leaders. But the timing of the monument building makes it pretty clear what the real motivation was: to physically symbolize white terror against blacks. They were mostly built during times when Southern whites were engaged in vicious campaigns of subjugation against blacks, and during those campaigns the message sent by a statue of Robert E. Lee in front of a courthouse was loud and clear.

No one should think that these statues were meant to be somber postbellum reminders of a brutal war. They were built much later, and most of them were explicitly created to accompany organized and violent efforts to subdue blacks and maintain white supremacy in the South. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a lot of Southerners don’t really understand this, but they should learn. There’s a reason blacks consider these statues to be symbols of bigotry and terror. It’s because they are.

Too many have said "let the monuments remain, they are part of history."  Sadly, they typically do not know all of the real history.   The Old South was not the pretty picture of Gone With the Wind. Behind the beautiful plantation homes there was much suffering and brutality - some inflicted by falsely labeled "pragons of virtue" like Robert E. Lee. Even Lee's great grandson has said he id OK with the removal of the monuments. 

Why Maintaining Confederate Statutes is NOT About Protecting History/Heritage

One of the main cries of apologists for the white supremacists who went on a rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend is that maintaining statutes honoring Confederate figures is honoring history and Southern heritage.  Never mind that these statutes sit not in museums where they could be used for history lessons but instead in public squares often near court houses and city halls.   In the case of the Lee statute in Charlottesville that triggered white supremacists' wrath on others, it used to sit literally in the courthouse square where it no doubt sent a message to black Virginians - as was the intent behind it in the first place.  Thus, those who bleat that these statutes represent history ignore the purpose behind them.  Anything rather than have to face the reality of their own feelings or the motivations of hate groups.  A piece in The Atlantic makes the case for the removal of such statutes and their relegation to museums and other locations that do not give a stamp of approval to what lay behind the South's rebellion: slavery and maintaining it as an institution. Blather about state's rights is merely a well crafted smoke screen.  Here are article highlights:

On Saturday in Charlottesville, a rally in defense of a statue of Robert E. Lee turned into a reenactment of the cause he led—white supremacists marching behind the Confederate battle flag, their opponents left injured or dead on the ground.

But like Lee’s soldiers, today’s defenders of white supremacy are fighting for a losing cause, a defeat that their violence will only serve to make deeper and more lasting than it otherwise would have been. Across the United States, the statues are starting to topple, the streets renamed, the memorials removed. These visible inscriptions of white supremacy into the American landscape are being erased. . . . . This was the rising tide of change that the Charlottesville rally hoped to stem.

As of August 2016, there were still more than 1,500 public commemorations of the Confederacy, even excluding the battlefields and cemeteries: 718 monuments and statutes still stood, and 109 public schools, 80 counties and cities, and 10 U.S. military bases bore the names of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate icons, according to a tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than 200 of these were in Virginia alone.

And one sits in the center of Charlottesville.  . . . . His defenders today insist that Lee’s heroism lay not least in his laying down his sword when the war was done, deciding to “promote harmony once he recognized defeat.” The speakers at the dedication likewise stressed Lee’s role as a peacemaker; one went so far as to imagine the statute depicted “not the lurid splendor of the battlefield,” but instead, Lee riding to Lexington to begin his tenure as a university president.

Yet this is not what the statue depicts. Not this one, nor the others. Where are the statues of Lee seated at Appomattox, signing the terms of that surrender? Where are the marbles and bronzes of Lee the college president, wearing civilian clothes, ensconced behind a desk piled high with paperwork? Why is this peacemaker always immortalized girded for war? . . . . And the reconciliation he offered was between whites—it pointedly excluded those he had held as property, whose freedom the war secured, but whose equality he bitterly contested.

Lee himself, after the war, encouraged a friend to banish the 90 newly freed women, children, and old men working on his plantation. The government could pay for their care, Lee advised; better to replace them with white labor. “I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.” That is the harmony Lee promoted.

Lee’s army was ordered to respect white property, but chose to regard the blacks it encountered as contraband—to be seized and returned to the South, whether born free, manumitted, or escaped. The army seized scores of their fellow Americans as slaves, actions sanctioned at the highest level of command; it took as many as a thousand back to Virginia.

Lee’s army, retreating in defeat, released some, but most were hauled South to the auction block. For the crime of refusing to cross back to Virginia, one boy was horribly mutilated, doused in turpentine, his genitals sliced off, and left to die in a barn by his Confederate captors. . . . . At the Battle of the Crater, Lee’s army slaughtered black prisoners; one soldier lamented that some survived because “we could not kill them as fast as they [passed] us.” This is what the uniform Lee wore represented; this is what the army he commanded did; this is the pose in which he is immortalized in the center of Charlottesville.

There is a reason why statues of Confederate generals are still powerful political symbols; a reason why a candidate came a hair’s breadth from securing the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Virginia by campaigning to preserve them. The statues in public squares, the names on street signs, the generals honored with military bases—these are the ways in which we, as a society, tell each other what we value, and build the common heritage around which we construct a nation.

The white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville saw this perhaps more clearly than the rest of us. They understood the stakes of what they were defending. They knew that Lee was honored not for making peace per se, but for defending a society built upon white supremacy—first by taking up arms, and then when the war was lost, by laying them down in such a way as to preserve what he could.

The myth of reunion was built around this understanding, that the nation should treat both sides in a war that killed three-quarters of a million Americans as equal, or at least not inquire too closely into the merits of each cause. And that unity would come not from honestly grappling with events, but from studiously ignoring injustice, and condemning those who oppose it as hateful.

This is why the city council of Charlottesville voted, a century after it was commissioned, to remove the statue of Robert Edward Lee.

And ultimately, it is why the others will come down, too. The statues will be moved, the streets renamed, and the military bases will honor patriots who fought for their country and not against it. Because a century and a half after Reconstruction began, America is still working on the project of constructing a more equal society, and reinvesting in the experiment of a multi-ethnic democracy.

The white nationalists in Charlottesville hoped to halt this project. Instead, they have simply given it fiercer, redoubled urgency.

 Much in history is ugly and not something to be honored or glorified. Pretending that the ugliness did not occur or wrapping it in the "Lost Cause" myth, however, does not change the real facts.  Defenders of these statutes ignore the hideous crimes committed by the Confederacy while at the same time longing for the white supremacy that it and the Jim Crow laws embodied.  Decent people should not mindlessly defend the indefensible by merely pretending they are protecting history.  Indeed, the history they are protecting is a false one compared to the ugly reality.

White Supremacist Trump Supporters Protest in Charlottesville

White supremacist Trump supporters

The husband and I just got back from Charlottesville, Virginia where I attended my law school class reunion.  We stayed at my sister and brother-in-law's home - who were out of the country - and enjoyed both the reunion events and spending time with one my nephews who was staying at his parents' home while they were gone. For those not familiar with Virginia or Charlottesville, it is perhaps the most liberal city in Virginia (in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton got 79.68% of the vote and Der Trumpenführer, got only 13.17% of the vote; even in surrounding Albemarle County, a one time Republican bastion, Clinton got 58.78% to Trump's 33.95%). Thus, it was a shock to see the media coverage of the protest by Trump supporting white supremacists in town at Lee park where they are enraged that a statute of Confederate general Robert E. Lee is to be removed from the park per a recent city council vote.  Indeed, my nephew, a long time resident of Charlottesville and graduate of the University of Virginia even conjectured that it was very unlikely that the protesters were actual residents of Charlottesville - or even Albemarle County.  More likely, they came from more remote surrounding counties that are much more reactionary and supported Donald Trump in the presidential election thanks to his racist rhetoric and self-prostitution to evangelical Christian leaders.  The Daily Progress looks at the protest that looked like a KKK rally except for the missing white robes:

Several dozen torch-wielding protesters gathered in Charlottesville’s Lee Park just after 9 p.m. Saturday, chanting “You will not replace us,” “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil.” 

After about 10 minutes, Charlottesville police arrived at the scene following an altercation between protesters. The crowd quickly dispersed with no further incidents, according to police.

In April, Charlottesville City Council voted to sell the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that stands in the park, but a judge earlier this month issued an injunction that prevents the city from doing so for six months.

The city’s decision has drawn considerable consternation from Southern heritage groups, Republican gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart and a number of others in Virginia and elsewhere.

Richard Spencer, a University of Virginia graduate and a white nationalist who popularized the term “alt-right,” wrote about the event at the Lee statue, as well as one earlier in the day at the city’s statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in Jackson Park, in several Twitter posts.

In a statement, Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer called the event “either profoundly ignorant or was designed to instill fear in our minority populations in a way that hearkens back to the days of the KKK. Either way, as mayor of this city, I want everyone to know this: we reject this intimidation. We are a welcoming city, but such intolerance is not welcome here.”

On Twitter, Del. David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville, called the “outrageous protests in Charlottesville this evening by apparent white supremacists” unacceptable.

Police were unable to confirm exactly who or what groups were at Lee and Jackson parks on Saturday night.

I am a lover of history, but the time has come when statutes to Confederate leaders need to be relegated to museums.  It is inappropriate to have statutes on public property who for whatever reasons fought to retain slavery.  And I say this as someone who could quality for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, if I so desired.  Yes, I have Confederate ancestors on my mother's side. Sadly, those like the demonstrators in Charlottesville have turned Confederate history into a memorial for racism and bigotry.