It’s true that contemporary racism doesn’t look exactly like yesterday’s racism. In many social circles white people no longer use the N-word. Lynchings have disappeared it hate crimes haven’t. We can all eat at the same restaurants and use the same drinking fountains and restrooms. But this self-contratulating myth that we as a generation have magically transcended race is not just immoral, it’s destructive. It blinds us to a racism that continues to have terrible consequences.

Rick Perry’s policies punish people of color. He’s tried to walk back his talk of secession, but he mentioned in purpose multiple times in order to fire up right wing nuts who heard the code for just what it was: a harkening back to a time when white people ruled and people of color were considered less than human.

We are very reluctant these days to brand anyone a racist. Even racists. I suppose there’s some good in that. At least we realize that racism is so evil we shouldn’t toss the word around lightly. Is the name of a hunting lease enough to earn Perry the brand? I don’t know. But the rush to issue a blanket pardon — “Rick Perry is not racist” — seems a bit too much to take. A governor who plays upon racial prejudice as Perry did with his secession comments should not be pardoned for their racial implications.

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Let’s be clear: If history is any indication, the Republicans are not going to nominate “a maverick” for president. The party has its share of them at the state and Congressional levels, but I’m talking about a presidential nominee who’s a true outsider in the McGovern sense.

That was always Pat Buchanan’s problem. It was where Jack Kemp hit a glass political ceiling. Reagan was the maverick when he lost in 1976. So was McCain in 2000.

Bachmann faces the same challenge. But she stepped up, met it head-on, and exceeded expectations on Monday. Exceeding expectations are what debates are about. Her strong performance should light a fire under Gov. Rick Perry, who increasingly seems like he is considering a run himself.

The other big winner was Romney, who comes from the other wing of the GOP -  the one where the nominees traditionally live. The big loser, of course, was Pawlenty, who grabbed media attention on the Sunday talk shows with his buzzword “Obamaney Care” and flubbed miserably on Monday, when he had a chance to keep up the momentum on a true national stage.

Pawlenty wrote a book called Courage To Stand, but he didn’t have enough courage to stand by that claim, much less plant it firmly on Romney’s forehead when the two were face to face. It was more than a missed opportunity; it was an affirmative mistake that reinforced his milquetoast image.

Romney walked on stage Monday at St. Anselm College as the frontrunner, and Pawlenty’s fumble let him leave largely unscathed. Romney showed cool in a cool medium and came across presidential. His campaign experience was evident.

But this group is far to the political right of the 2008 GOP field, and that is Bachmann territory. Being ultraconservative helps in this early phase. Down the stretch Republicans are going to think increasingly about who can beat Obama. They are going to ask who can appeal to independents and conservative Democrats. That is Romney’s biggest asset, and he lucked out because the others chose to use this first debate to introduce themselves in a positive light rather than to attack him.

The key thing Bachmann did was move out of Sarah Palin’s shadow. She showed news savvy by announcing she had filed her papers and was an official candidate. She showed political savvy by being the first one in the first debate to swiftly and firmly promise to eliminate the Obama health care program. It made the rest of the group, who scampered to restate their own similar positions, look like they were following her lead.

Bachmann carefully introduced herself in terms of her real work as a member of Congress, but her most impressive moment – the one where she showed real message savvy – was when she tied health reform in a negative way directly to the issue Obama is trying to seize: jobs. She cited a study that shows it’s a job killer. An 800,000-job killer. It was a political twofer and a signal she is ready to campaign at a sophisticated level.

Bachmann’s biggest job right now is to convince political insiders who know her as a bomb thrower that she is more than a “movement candidate.” If she is serious, she can’t be the GOP’s Dennis Kucinich. She clearly is the candidate that the Tea Party is most comfortable with and, like it or not, that means she has a real Republican constituency.

Perry (and Palin) are Bachmann’s strongest competition for those voters, but both are still playing coy. Perry doesn’t have the national exposure Palin has, so he can’t wait as long as Palin can to enter the race. If he is serious, Bachman’s strong showing was bad news for him.

Ron Paul has a constituency, but nobody believes he is going to get the nomination. Romney has a national base of supporters left over from four years ago. The rest of that group is hoping for the type of “catch fire” opportunity Pawlenty flubbed.

I worked on Ann Richards’ campaign in 1994, when many Texas Democrats didn’t take George W. Bush seriously until it was too late. I watched Al Gore and national Democrats make the same smug mistake six years later. I’d never vote for Bachmann, but in terms of making the most of a specific campaign moment, I’m not afraid to give her kudos for an impressive job on Monday night. Perry’s advisers should do the same.

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It may be spring in the Mideast, but a chill wind is howling in America as America’s Right puffs its cheeks like Old Man Winter. Education and the personal freedom to control one’s body and sexual life fuel powerful democratic movements. What kind of movement then is America’s Right engaged in?

French social scientist Emmanuel Todd is explicit about the democratizing power of literacy and reproductive freedom. They lead to:

…the transformation of the political system, a spreading wave of democratization and the conversion of subjects into citizens.

But the American Right seeks the opposite, the conversion of citizens into subjects. That they do so while speaking of liberty is just more authoritarian “denying and distorting of information” in the words of Italian humanist, Auschwitz survivor and anti-fascist Primo Levi.

Is the Right really mounting a war on contraception? While far-right conservatives have largely succeeded in snookering the credulous news media into framing its anti-birth control agenda as all about abortion, they seek much more than an abortion ban.

In a moment of unintended candor, a leading conservative Texas state legislator, Wayne Christian, recently confessed. The Texas Tribune asked Christian whether he was engaged in a war on birth control. He answered:

Of course it’s a war on birth control, on abortions, on everything. That’s what family planning is all about.

Christian is no isolated crank. He has helped lead the charge to eliminate spending on family planning and force women to undergo sonograms before a pregnancy is terminated. In Texas, insurance companies no longer have to cover birth control.

Despite the recent federal budget fight over Planned Parenthood, progressives seem only drowsily aware of the assault on birth control. Painful as it is to do, we should listen more carefully to Rush Limbaugh, who recently mocked birth control and laughed in agreement when a caller said a woman should just keep her legs closed. We should also keep tabs on the Family Research Council, which thinks birth control is a contrivance of the devil.

On education, the Right’s assault is well underway. According to Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 34 states and the District of Columbia have cut aid to K-12. Forty-three states have cut funding for public colleges and universities.

This weekend, we can add Texas to that list. The Legislature, wrapping up a session that looks more and more like a Rick Perry for President campaign commercial, is cutting public education by $4 billion and locking 20,000 qualified students out of a college education.

Most Americans don’t support these anti-democratic policies, but they don’t really know they are happening. It’s a very small number of conservative elites driving the agenda. Their followers are blind and weak, convinced by decades of conservative propaganda that all their troubles stem from a too-big liberal state or from various “Others.” Some of these Others, demonstrably poor, stand accused of taking more than their fair share. The contradiction is lost on the intellectually infirm.

America’s most dangerous myth is the “It-Can’t-Happen-Here” story. The cowed political press continues to treat the profoundly authoritarian conservative agenda with kid gloves.

And Democrats get the framing wrong on most of the issues at hand. For instance, millions of American Catholics defied the Vatican on birth control. Don’t we think Catholics and non-Catholics would defy the anti-contraception Wayne Christians of the world? But we allow the debate to be framed solely around the question of abortion when we should be talking about the War on Contraceptives, government control of our bodies and private lives and the loss of personal liberty.

We get deep in the wonky weeds on education, and we always have. The fundamental issue is simple to frame: Without free public education there is no democracy, there is no America.

But, of course, It Can’t Happen Here, so why worry. That’s my great frustration. I know most Americans are deeply committed to democracy. We stood in awesome solidarity with the pro-democracy rebels in Egypt and elsewhere. But many are blind to the real struggle at home.

Primo Levi, in a 1974 essay called “A Past We Thought Would Never Return,” wrote these words:

Every age has its own fascism and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of the privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.

In his brilliant, just-published essay on Levi, Stanislav G. Pugliese adds:

…the attempt of the fascist state to seize control of the family through social legislation (preventing abortions, outlawing contraception…)

Let’s check off the list with reference to the American Right’s agenda. Paralyzing public education. Check. Outlawing contraceptives and abortions. Check. Denying and distorting information. Check. Undermining systems of justice. Check (Patriot Act; tort reform). Forced labor (union busting; wage and pension cuts). Check. Nostalgia for an imagined world of perfect order, authority and obedience. Check.

With regard to America or Americans, the word “fascism” is taboo. We could be prohibited by convention from using the word “cancer,” too. But rogue cells would still destroy bodies.

There is no comparison to Hitler here. His was a special evil. I would just like the Right’s agenda to be seen for what it is, profoundly anti-democratic and authoritarian. When it is seen for what it is, and if it’s not too late, Americans will condemn it. And defeat it.

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Gov. Rick Perry’s lackies and cronies are all over scandal. Just yesterday another name surfaced:  Consultant Anthony Holm, who has worked for Perry and Perry financier (and Swift Boat funder) Bob Perry, was named a source of money by Greenie kat swift (nothing upper case about her) in her happy email. They needed the money to fund a petition drive so they could get on the ballot here. More than half-a-million dollars. Where’s Bebe Rebozo when you need him? On the other end of kat swift’s emails, it seems.

It’s a case of childish willfulness overwhelming judgment and the moral compass as well. I believe kat swift and the Green Party candidates care about their causes. But what they seem to care most about is being publicly recognized. Among their friends, they can take comfort in a sanctimonious fairy-land in which only they are right and just. The GOP wants them on the ballot to take votes from Democrats. But Republicans are really bribing the Greens to help perpetuate Republican rule and the status quo. But nothing can shake the self-righteousness of the Green’s fairy-land. It’s sad, really.

Now the Green’s have retreated to an argument that they simply want to preserve the voices of those who signed their petitions (petitions circulated with hundreds of thousands of dollars of dirty money). They are destroying the integrity of the election process to save it, I suppose, or so their story goes.

Do they really believe that their hoped-for ends — which they drive further away by their actions — justify these means? Really?

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• Genius at PolitiFact: Rick Perry not Actually Louis XIV!

That’s because the geniuses behind PolitiFact chose to truth-test the following Boyd Richie quote about Rick Perry: “He’s spending Texans’ hard-earned money to live like Louis XIV.”

Man, have you ever seen such a withering, scandalous and altogether outrageous attack? That Boyd Richie sure is playing rough. Or maybe not.

Though the truth test acknowledges the statement’s rather-gentle humor, precious ink and bandwidth were, nevertheless, wasted Wednesday on a literal analysis of its truth. We’re told about Louis’s 20-room house, the gardens, the orange trees and the theater – all of which are denied to poor old Rick. The piece concludes with a rating of Pantalon en Fue, or Pants on Fire. That’s their designation for a whopping lie.

Since I’m completely unfamiliar with French, I’ll butcher some Spanish for my thoughts on this: Caca de caballo!

Literalism is the refuge of a twit. Very often, it’s a defensive maneuver designed to hide one’s inability to formulate a reasoned response to another’s argument. Or, in this case, an inability to find some better use for one’s freakin’ time.

Moreover, PolitiFact’s literal analysis was as deep as a baby pool and, shall we say, just as pristine. Did Louis’s house, circa 1715, have indoor plumbing and bathrooms? How big was his fridge? How loud was his stereo? Did he have one of those fancy, color-coordinated washer-dryer combos? Did he have a freakin’ Food & Wine subscription? Should we give a rat’s ass?

Still, it wasn’t the literalism that set me off. Nor was it the shallow reasoning. I don’t really care about that stuff.

It does make me a little mad that PolitiFact is trying to suck out the last particle of humor left in politics, but that didn’t inspire me to spew invective.

What I do care about and what really torqued me is that this is the second time PolitiFact has provided cover for Perry by diverting the debate off-point.

Remember Rick’s “act of God” line about the oil spill? Did PolitiFact challenge that? Nope. Instead, they tested Perry’s explanation that came after the controversy boiled over. And sure enough, PolitiFact said he was right.

Never mind that Perry isn’t a lawyer and probably didn’t know “act of God” was a legal term of art. Never mind the irony “act of God” clauses being used to deny insurance payments to people like those poor souls on the Louisiana coast.

Boyd Richie and the Democrats are making this point: Rick Perry is living high on the hog at the taxpayers’ expense while average Texans are struggling through a recession that, if you will recall, our Governor once said didn’t exist.

Moreover, Perry is living his taxpayer-funded lifestyle of the rank and fatuous after becoming a millionaire himself over the last 20 some-odd years in politics. How in the hell did that happen?

Perhaps Perry will say getting rich was also an act of God. Who’ll join me in betting that PolitiFact rates it true?

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At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference here, Texas Gov. Rick Perry invoked his love for the Tenth Amendment, the New Confederacy’s code term for “get the black man out of the White House.”

Touting his states’ rights bona fides, [Perry] said, “I believe in the 10th Amendment with all my heart. Basically what is says is that the federal government was created to be an agent of the states, not the other way around.

Sarah Palin was here. So was Newt Gingrich. Mentions of Hurricane Katrina were few and far between. “We are so over Katrina,” said a New Orleans GOP activist. But the full collapse of the moral levees that once held back a tide of hatred and prejudice was evident. The New Confederacy – despite Mitt Romney’s one-vote win and Palin’s third-place finish in the Southern Republican Leadership Conference – is now the GOP’s dominant political force.

Republicans’ coded racist appeals, beginning with Richard Nixon’s infamous “southern strategy,” weakened the Democratic Party in the South. In the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, white voters fled the Democrats’ Big Tent for the Republicans’ Big Box, the wall-to-Walmart, magnolia-white land of confederate dreams.

I can’t decide now whether the Republicans have ineffectively cornered themselves in the South (and in a few simpatico states outside Dixie), or whether they are building a viable new movement, based in the former slave states, but with enough national appeal to reverse the outcome of the Civil War, to impose hierarchical, racist attitudes on the rest of the country.

For those who’d rather wish away the role of race in American elections, I think it’s telling that Democrats’ national victories since the ‘60s have been by two Southerners and one African-American. Talk of racial transcendentalism surrounded all three of them. How long can we keep theoretically transcending racism? I don’t know.

I do know this. Democrats, especially in the South, are often fairly paralyzed by their opponents’ racist appeals to voters. Faced with a violent storm of prejudice, they can be as inept as Bush was when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

In my own Texas, Democrats tried to hang on to rural and suburban white voters by dodging and ducking the issue. Any talk of race might alienate more whites, they figured, so they were forever trying to change the subject to something more genteel and fit for polite company.

A part of this is Democrats’ vexing habit of trying to fit themselves to the current mood of voters rather than set out to change the mood of voters. Republican consultants are far more ideological than Democratic consultants. When they get their polls back, they look at where the voters are, but only so they know what they have to do to move them. Democrats’ more, uh, politically flexible consultants mistake the map for the territory. It is an odd thing that the party of change is, tactically, the party of conformity.

In any case, it seems almost trite to say we have a moral imperative to take on the racists. As Blue Texas noted at FireDogLake last week, a new study shows us that “there seem to be an awful lot of Teabaggers who have a serious issue with race.” Right now, false gentility and wishful thinking are fogging up or moral lenses. A New Confederacy is being built. Maybe it will collapse under the weight of its own moral depravity. We shouldn’t wait to see.

We don’t even have to look forward to see it. The strategy of ignoring or side-stepping the racist appeals of Republicans has failed Democrats for nearly half a century. Why they would continue to think it will work is, well, simply stupid.

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Either Perry and reporters covering him don’t know what socialism is (and I doubt that), or Perry again is pushing  Tea Bag propaganda, and the press is too lazy or too intimidated to challenge it.

I’m used to Perry embarrassing Texas. So, I’m not surprised he’s parroting Dolph Briscoe’s old obsession with “creeping socialism.”  Thankfully, we’ve moved beyond the 1970s, though you wouldn’t know it from the Cold War rhetoric in a statement Perry released last Sunday and sound bites he repeated later in the week.

Journalists can’t stop politicians from issuing statements, but they can – and should – challenge them and include clarifying context in their reports when statements and sound bites push outright lies. Last week, the Associated Press and others quoted Perry (without questioning it or providing context) saying, the legislation “crosses over into the line of socialism.”

Socialism, for anyone who slept through 11^th grade, is an economic system where the means of production are owned either by the government or directly by the workers. The Socialist Party USA actually opposed the reform bill because it does just the opposite.

Obama and the Democratic Congress rejected a socialist approach when they removed the public option, which would have put the federal government in competition with for-profit companies. That effectively preserved the American insurance industry – and the longstanding market structure that supports it – as a conglomeration of regulated, shareholder-owned corporations.

Don’t believe me? Go to the NYSE; they are all still there: Aetna, Cigna, etc… There is no new federal program like Medicare or Social Security to compete in the marketplace with private insurers – much less replace them. (It does expand Medicaid, the federal-state partnership in place since 1965 to provide insurance for the  poor, but people on Medicaid are not potential buyers for market-priced insurance.)  It’s simply a disgrace for Perry to mislead Texans who trust him, and it’s a disappointment for journalists who know better to allow him to use their access to the public and the credibility of their organizations to spread the “socialist” lie.

What I think we’re seeing is Perry trying to creep out of the corner Congressional Republicans have created for anyone running on their ticket this year. Their saber rattling about repealing the legislation is just trash talk and fundraising fodder that raises further questions about their credibility. They know, and so do we, that there is no way they can flip enough seats in November to get the 2/3 majority in the House and Senate they would need to override Obama’s veto of anything designed to repeal this bill.

And frankly, anyone who has ever worked on a campaign at any significant level can see that barring something unforeseen it’s a huge mistake for Republicans to make health care their signature national issue. Political campaigns aren’t about trying to change anyone’s mind or core values. That’s foolish; it just doesn’t happen. Campaigns are about convincing a majority of voters that the issues most important to them the day they vote are the issues they think your party is best prepared to handle.

In political parlance, taxes, the economy and defense are considered “Republican issues.” Education, the environment, human services (like health care) are considered “Democratic issues.”  If the midterm elections end up being about health care, conventional wisdom says, the narrative foundation favors Democrats. That is why I think Republicans eventually will try to shift the narrative to the economy, perhaps unemployment.

Bill White is the first Democrat in more than a decade with a real chance to win statewide in Texas, but he is going to have to be almost perfect to do it. His chances increase if the campaign narrative centers on health care and he is smart enough to use it to his advantage. His chances skyrocket if education joins health care as a top tier issue.

The Austin American-Statesman reported this week that Texas has the highest rate (25.1 percent) of uninsured residents in the nation. The number of Texas businesses that offer insurance to employees since Perry came into office dropped from 53 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2007. And  per-worker spending on insurance increased at a faster pace in Texas between 2000 and 2007 than it did nationally. (Here is a detailed overview of how Health Care Reform will affect Texas. It has 27 footnotes to document information that comes almost entirely from nonpartisan sources such as the American Medical Association, Kaiser Health Facts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Health Care is not a winning issue for Perry, which is why he’s selling the “socialist” scarecrow. He’s trying to reframe the issue, and he is using demagoguery to do it. You certainly aren’t hearing him say: “Let’s repeal the annual and lifetime caps on insurance reimbursement!” Or “Hey, I promise to restore the insurance companies’ right to refuse to treat your pre-existing conditions and drop your coverage when you get sick!”

Add the recent brouhaha at the Texas State Board of Education, and the political gods have handed White a real opening.

The question is whether White can package those issues for voters so they draw simple distinctions between him and Perry that are consistent with White’s own record. And whether news reporters continue to let Perry get away with terms like “socialism,” which misrepresent the truth, inflame public sentiment and question the credibility of the governor and news organizations that are covering this aspect of his campaign.

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While everyone’s talking

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again:  the GOP consultants and lobbyists who empower these paranoid and dangerous extremists just to win elections (or, say, defeat health care reform) are cynical Dr. Frankensteins. I really wonder how they can explain it to their children.

In any case, voters kicked some of the extremists off the State Board of Education yesterday. Both Don McLeroy and Tincy Miller lost, and the Democrat who sometimes voted with the anti-science and anti-reason block didn’t even run. Tea Partiers didn’t succeed in any congressional challenges in the GOP primary, though they did defeat longtime East Texas Rep. Tommy Merritt and force another, Delwin Jones into a runoff.

The extremists did pad Perry’s margin of victory over Hutchison, but that’s about all. Hutchison ran a campaign just about as bad as oddball Democrat Farouk Shami, who got what, 13 percent of the vote? Perry’s been in office so long that just his appointees and their families and friends probably give him a healthy 20 percent head start!

If Texans wake up, the extremists might turn out to be the best weapon Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bill White has. Perry can’t run away with them. He has national ambitions of some sort. Maybe he’s posing as a presidential aspirant simply to leverage a cabinet appointment or something. Whatever he’s doing, he can’t run away from the Right. It’s the racists, the ranters and the night riders that Perry brings to the table. They’re the only reason the national GOP will let him in the door.

No one should forget that Perry is running as an old timey Southern racist, hence his talk of secession and so-called “Tenth Amendment” support. No one should forget the corruption that’s marked his administration. Or the lies. He goes begging for federal money to balance the budget (and funnel to his cronies) while pretending he hates the same federal government benefactors that saved his bacon. He is a transparent phony.

Democrats (please read this Mayor White) would be wise to hit Perry hard now and never let up. He should be unelectable. He can’t be allowed to succeed with his dangerous masquerade.

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