Romney, GOP tall tales and the truth

By Richard B. Muhammad -Editor- | Last updated: Sep 6, 2012 - 11:56:43 AM

Every campaign for the presidency involves a narrative, a story, a well-spun yarn, that allows the candidates to set the framework for their ideas, their arguments and their reasons why voters should take their side.

During the Republican convention in Tampa, the GOP rolled out its narrative as the freedom-loving, patriotic, optimistic party of the future versus the divisive, big government, freedom-hating, stuck-in-the-past party of President Obama.

From Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to Republican Marco Rubio, the Spanish-speaking Florida senator whose parents hail from Cuba, to a slightly off-kilter and aged actor Clint Eastwood, the evening of Aug. 30 in Tampa, Fla., was about the greatness of America, the hard work of Americans, the vision of Americans and the great future for this country.

The only problem with the narrative is it was a fairytale of epic proportions designed to appeal to people who look like the almost lily-White audience that heard the speeches and sanctioned Romney as Republican candidate for president.

In a country with a growing non-White population, the crowd wasn’t diverse unless you count the type of clothing worn by delegates.

That visual, however, should not be surprising as the GOP could actually be called today the SWP, Southern White Party, which is where it gets its base and the bulk of its power. David Bositis, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, has called the Republican Party, “the Party of Whiteness.” Over the past half century, a White majority has voted Republican, “in bad times mostly,” he noted.

“If Republicans don’t have a clue as to why Blacks, at least conscious African-Americans, deplore the party, they need to view Romney’s speech again but with a Black interpreter. Last night was a shameful exercise in revisionist history topped by a naked appeal to the virtues of state’s rights, all ending in a minstrel show featuring a black gospel recording artist singing ‘America the Beautiful,’ ” observed Walter Fields, of North Star News, in a post-GOP confab column.

Rubio stoked revisions with his ode to opportunity and liberty found in America, a refuge from oppression. He neglected to say what happened to the Indigenous people of the land, who were decimated and today often suffer from poverty and despair.

Rubio failed to note the presence of the children of America’s former slaves who didn’t ask to come here and didn’t arrive on the Nina, the Pinta or the Santa Maria. They came in hellish holds of slave ships having endured a Transatlantic holocaust only to be dropped into a living hell.

Today’s children of enslaved Africans continue to suffer, unable to be fully integrated into American life and existing in a separate world or dual identity so bad comedian D.L. Hughley has described Blacks who succeed as suffering from a type of survivors’ guilt given the numbers of friends, family and schoolmates ground up in America’s vicious poverty-drug-prison-despair cycle.

While Rubio celebrated the joyous reception Cubans, mostly White Cubans, found in Florida after fleeing Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, he neglected to mention bodies of Haitians that washed up on beaches in the 1980s and 1990s as many fled oppression from U.S.-backed dictators and economic misery inflicted by U.S. policy and companies.

Romney wasn’t to be outdone. He crowed about how in times of challenge, the world needed an American. Does that include nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, support for a murderous minority White regime in South Africa and helping to lock up Nelson Mandela, who is now the darling hero of the West? Or perhaps he was talking about U.S. military forays in Korea, or Vietnam or Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Libya? Or was it the huge monetary outlays and support of global Cold War dictators?

Romney’s whoppers didn’t stop there, he swore after the 2008 election, the country was ready to come together. Lies, lies and damn lies. Republican leader Mitch McConnell declared making Obama a one-term president was the party’s number one goal early on. Not creating jobs, fighting homelessness, revamping education but stopping Obama by any means necessary was the GOP mission. Add right wing media-god Rush Limbaugh’s declaration that he hoped Obama failed and you pretty much have the GOP playbook. These thoughts came from “responsible leaders,” so is mentioning a 400 percent increase in physical threats against the president and attacks on Blacks the night Obama won worth mentioning?

The GOP narrative may have tickled some ears, stoked some egos and fed some delusions, but it didn’t offer a country in crisis the truth needed to survive.

Final Call editor-in-chief Richard B. Muhammad can be reached at editor@ finalcall.com. You can also follow him on Facebook and @RMfinalcall on Twitter.

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