Has the Democratic Party just blanked out everything that happened before 1865? Or even 1878? Or 9/11?

President Obama went after Donald Trump again today over his demagoguery about the Presidential election being rigged. (Tierney Sneed, Obama: Trump Should 'Stop Whining' About Rigged Election 10/18/2016)

And it's great that he's doing that.

But is it really necessary to do it in a history-begins-today mode?

"There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even -- you could even rig America's elections," Obama said at a press conference at the Rose Garden Tuesday, while pointing out how decentralized U.S. elections are and the lack of evidence of fraud in the past.

He also suggested that Trump's "unprecedented" attempt to "discredit" an elections process before it has even taken place shows the he does not have "leadership and toughness that you'd want out of a president."

"You start whining before the game's even over? If whenever things are going badly for you and you lose you start blaming somebody else, then you don't have what it takes to be in this job," Obama said.

Trump has in recent weeks gone beyond his usual claims of a political system vaguely biased against him, to suggest that there would be voter fraud at the precinct level, a claim that has troubled observers and lawmakers across the political spectrum.

Obama on Monday said that one of the "greatest" things about U.S. democracy is bipartisan tradition surrounding the transfer of presidential power.

"Historically, regardless of party, the person who loses the election congratulates the winner, reaffirms or democracy and we move forward," Obama said. "That's how democracy survives, because we recognize that there's something more important than any individual campaign, and that is making sure that the integrity and trust in our institutions sustains itself, because democracy by definition works by consent. Not by force." [my emphasis]

I won't rehash the points I made yesterday. And I haven't seen the full text of Obama's appearance from which he's quoted. So I can't even say that he missed an opportunity to use the issue to highlight the Republican Party's continuous segregationist misdeeds in voter suppression.

Also for reasons I discussed yesterday, including the Republicans' voter suppression program, I'm not so comfortable seeing the Democratic President simply brush off even the possibility of a Presidential election being "rigged." For one thing: Grand Theft Florida 2000.

Digby Parton takes up the issue today in It’s the Republicans who rig elections, Donald: The GOP history of voter suppression goes way back Salon 10/1//2016:

Some Republican leaders have tried to reassure voters that the election will not be stolen, but it’s too little, too late. After all, Republicans have been trying to manipulate elections for decades going all the way back to Operation Eagle Eye during the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign when future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was a young lawyer intimidating black and Latino voters in Arizona. Then, as now, this was done in the name of preventing unauthorized people from voting.

In the 1980s, there were consent decrees in place all over the country as various local arms of the GOP got caught violating federal election laws by trying to suppress minority votes. In the wake of Jesse Jackson’s highly successful voter registration drives, Republicans instigated a campaign to purge voter rolls in African-American communities throughout the South and urban areas. They professionalized and nationalized their operation by recruiting lawyers and training them in the election laws of different jurisdictions so they could more efficiently challenge Democratic votes.

By the 2000 election they had hundreds of trained election lawyers at the ready and they all swooped in on Florida when Al Gore asked for a recount. (The state party under Jeb Bush had already taken care of the purge of African-Americans from the voter rolls, which helped make it so close.) Ironically, the chief justice of the Supreme Court was William Rehnquist and naturally he cast the deciding vote to stop the recount and hand the election to George W. Bush.

Immediately upon taking office, Republicans began to work on their next big vote suppression project.

The President is right insofar as the idea of successfully "rigging" a Presidential election via the kind of in-person voter fraud he's warning against - and which has been the non-problem at the center of the "voter fraud" campaign - is virtually impossible with our current election laws and practices. Trump is also saying that media coverage he doesn't like is also "rigging" the election, which is just silly. Whether Trump was helped or hurt overall by the mainstream media coverage he got is another question. So is the question of the general quality of media coverage of politics these days. But bad press is not the same as "rigging" an election, at least not in any normal usage of "rigging."

But I wince inside when I see Obama or others calling this "unprecedented." Aside from Grand Theft Florida 2000, a disputed Florida vote also played a role in the 1876 Presidential election. Rutherford B. Hayes is now remembered for his singular first name. And for the drama around his selection as President. From the Britannica Online entry for him, on the 1876 election:

An economic depression ... and Northern disenchantment with Reconstruction policies in the South combined to give Hayes’s Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, a popular majority, and early returns indicated a Democratic victory in the electoral college as well. Hayes’s campaign managers challenged the validity of the returns from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, and as a result two sets of ballots were submitted from the three states. The ensuing electoral dispute became known as the Tilden-Hayes affair. Eventually a bipartisan majority of Congress created a special Electoral Commission to decide which votes should be counted. As originally conceived, the commission was to comprise seven Democrats, seven Republicans, and one independent, the Supreme Court justice David Davis. Davis refused to serve, however, and the Republican Joseph P. Bradley was named in his place. While the commission was deliberating, Republican allies of Hayes engaged in secret negotiations with moderate Southern Democrats aimed at securing acquiescence to Hayes’s election. On March 2, 1877, the commission voted along strict party lines to award all the contested electoral votes to Hayes, who was thus elected with 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184. The result was greeted with outrage and bitterness by some Northern Democrats, who thereafter referred to Hayes as “His Fraudulency.”

Before that, there was at least some serious talk among High Federalists after the 1800 election about forcibly preventing Thomas Jefferson from taking power as the elected President.

And after the election of 1860, it's safe to say that the opposition among Southern slaveowners was not a model of a peaceful or graceful transfer of power. And the 1864 election took place during the Civil War started by the Slave Power after the 1860 elections.

I'm not sure whether I would include 1824 in the list, though Andrew Jackson's partisans did say forever afterward that the outcome was the result of a "Corrupt Bargain" between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay.

We know America is Exceptional and all. The guy who was state chairman of the Florida Republican Party in 2000 said yesterday on the PBS Newshour, "America is a beacon of light for people all throughout the world who want their democracies to work our way." This may come to a bit of a surprise to people living in parliamentary democracies who find the American two-party system baffling. The way the 2000 Presidential election was decided didn't exactly impress everyone outside the US, either. Still, what he and the other person being interviewed say about how the US election system actually works is pretty good. Including why stealing a Presidential election via in-person voter fraud is effectively impossible.

Why Trump’s ‘rigged election’ claims are wrong and dangerous​ 11/17/2016:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 17: Politics of race and voting rights today

Jamelle Bouie weighs in on the Chait-Coates discussion on white racism in Color Blind Slate 04/07/2014. He makes this observation about civil rights in the Obama era:

Of course, it’s not accusing conservatives of "racism" to note that particular policies — say, tax cuts to defund the social safety net, or blocking the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act—have a disparate impact. That's just reality. And it's not tarring your opponents to note that race plays a huge part in building popular support for those policies. But again, for as much as this is interesting as a matter of political combat, it's less important to telling the story of race in the Obama years than, for instance, the tremendous retrenchment of racial inequality during our five years of recession, recovery, and austerity. [my emphasis]

The structural problems of white racism won't go away without confronting them directly.

Bouie reacts to the perspective he understands Jonathan Chait to be articulating, one common to the superficial coverage of the mainstream media more generally, which focuses on race in terms of its function as a partisan topic of political fights. In the current context, Chait is giving support to the whiny-white-guy victim posture the Republicans are currently using in which they claim to be terribly wrong whenever they are challenged on white racism:

Still, if you're trying to tell the story of race in the Obama years, Chait's version strikes me as utterly ancillary. First and foremost in this history has to be the ways in which race kept its material salience despite the momentous political event of a black president. The partisan reactions to Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis are less important than the activism that emerged around them, in the same way that Republican complaints of language policing are less important than the party’s ongoing push for voter suppression. [my emphasis]

That last point is extremely important. It doesn't matter if the Republicans are pushing to enact segregationist voter suppression laws with their hearts full of Christian love as they do it. They're pushing anti-democracy segregation laws that are a a manifestation of white racism in action, white racism which such laws establish in the core of the American democratic system. The effects are what count.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, voting rights, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2014, April 17: Obama defends voting rights

Ta-Nehisi Coates in Barack Obama's Challenge to American Morality The Atlantic 04/14/2014 expresses his satisfaction with the President's speech opposition voter-suppression laws:

I believe in judging Barack Obama's rhetoric and policies not as though he were the president of black America, but of the United States of America. On that count his speech soared. There aren't many topics more important than the security of our democracy. The president did not attack that topic gingerly, but forcefully, directly and without hedge.

This is the speech to which he's referring, Remarks by the President at the National Action Network's 16th Annual Convention 04/11/2014:

From the White House transcript:

Just as inequality feeds on injustice, opportunity requires justice. And justice requires the right to vote. (Applause.) President Johnson, right after he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, told his advisors -- some of whom were telling him, well, all right, just wait. You’ve done a big thing now; let’s let the dust settle, don’t stir folks up. He said, no, no, I can’t wait. We’ve got to press forward and pass the Voting Rights Act. Johnson said, “About this there can and should be no argument. Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.” (Applause.)

Voting is a time when we all have an equal say -— black or white, rich or poor, man or woman. It doesn't matter. In the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our democracy, we’re all supposed to have that equal right to cast our ballot to help determine the direction of our society.

The principle of one person, one vote is the single greatest tool we have to redress an unjust status quo. You would think there would not be an argument about this anymore. But the stark, simple truth is this: The right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago.

Across the country, Republicans have led efforts to pass laws making it harder, not easier, for people to vote. In some places, women could be turned away from the polls just because they're registered under their maiden name but their driver’s license has their married name. Senior citizens who have been voting for decades may suddenly be told they can no longer vote until they can come up with the right ID.

In other places, folks may learn that without a document like a passport or a birth certificate, they can’t register. About 60 percent of Americans don’t have a passport. Just because you don’t have the money to travel abroad doesn't mean you shouldn’t be able to vote here at home. (Applause.) And just to be clear, I know where my birth certificate is, but a lot of people don’t. (Laughter.) A lot of people don't. (Applause.) I think it’s still up on a website somewhere. (Laughter.) You remember that? That was crazy. That was some crazy stuff. (Laughter and applause.) I hadn't thought about that in a while. (Laughter.) [my emphasis]

Next comes the Bipartisan pitch: "Now, I want to be clear -- I am not against reasonable attempts to secure the ballot. We understand that there has to be rules in place." The segregationist propaganda used to justify the voter-suppression laws uses just this excuse: that in-person voter fraud, which in reality is about as close to being a non-existing problem as it could be, is actually a terrible problem that has to be solved by voter-suppression laws. Obama just can't seem to avoid using the Republican framing even when he's otherwise arguing effectively against a key Republican position. At least he follows it directly with, "But I am against requiring an ID that millions of Americans don't have. That shouldn't suddenly prevent you from exercising your right to vote. (Applause.)" And he does go on to explain what a crock the voter-fraud claim is.

The speech is a good one. But I have less enthusiasm for it than Coates seems to have. Because nobody doubts Obama's ability to give a good speech. It's the follow-through that's usually so weak. For me, the archetype of nice words followed by action (or lack thereof) that doesn't come close to matching the seriousness of his words was his weekly address after the Supreme Court handed down its plutocratic Citizens United decision: "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," the President said. How many times have we ever heard a President to declare a problem that serious? "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest," he also said. This is while the Democrats held a majority in both houses of Congress. But in that speech he also pleaded for a bipartisan solution. He made a half-hearted attempt to get on. And since then? What has he done to rally the public or get legislative against against that problem he said "strikes at our democracy itself," the problem of which he couldn't image "anything more devastating to the public interest"?

Well, he did talk about his bipartisan commission that made recommendations to address the concerns of Both Sides. And he had reassuring things like the following to say:

Voting is not a Democratic issue, it’s not a Republican issue. It’s an issue of citizenship. (Applause.) It’s what makes our democracy strong.

But it’s a fact this recent effort to restrict the vote has not been led by both parties -- it’s been led by the Republican Party. And in fairness, it’s not just Democrats who are concerned. You had one Republican state legislator point out -- and I’m quoting here -- “Making it more difficult for people to vote is not a good sign for a party that wants to attract more people.” (Laughter.) That was a pretty -- that’s a good insight. (Laughter.) Right? I want a competitive Republican Party, just like a competitive Democratic Party. That’s how our democracy is supposed to work -- the competition of ideas. But I don’t want folks changing the rules to try to restrict people’s access to the ballot. ...

But remember, just as injustice perpetuates inequality, justice opens up opportunity. And as infuriating as efforts to roll back hard-earned rights can be, the trajectory of our history has to give us hope. The story of America is a story of progress. No matter how often or how intensely that progress has been challenged, ultimately this nation has moved forward. As Dr. King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, [but] it bends towards justice." We move forward on civil rights and we move forward on workers’ rights, and we move forward on women’s rights and disability rights and gay rights. We show that when ordinary citizens come together to participate in this democracy we love, justice will not be denied. (Applause.) So the single most important thing we can do to protect our right to vote is to vote. (Applause.)

We'll see over the next couple of years if he is more serious about voting rights than he was about undoing the Citizens United problem the Supreme Court created.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2014, voting rights, white racism