What Are Republicans Complaining About?

Amy Davidson looks at Joe Biden's, "They're going to put y'all back in chains" line from last week:

Biden later said that he has been referring to the frequent use of shackle imagery by Republicans talking about reducing regulations on business. Indeed, CNN came up with a whole highlights reel of Republicans using that phrase, including Paul Ryan (“We believe a renewed commitment to limited government will unshackle our economy”) and John Boehner (“unshackle the private sector”), who has also talked about economic freedom and slavery. CNN, though, said that Biden’s language was different, “given where he was and who he was talking to”—that is, an audience that included many black people, in a town that had been the capital of the Confederacy. There is something awkward, though, about the argument that something that works as a metaphor for a general audience becomes toxic because it’s Danville—weren’t Boehner and Ryan also addressing black Americans? What was confusing was whether Biden’s critics felt that he was being racially insensitive or racially inflammatory. Of course, slavery and the decades of imperfect freedom that followed are no secret, to black or white audiences (or mixed ones, as in Danville), and neither is the fact that medical bills, unemployment, and student loans can leave one (metaphorically) indentured. This is not to let Biden off entirely: one does wonder if, in another context, the imagery would have struck him as useful. The offensiveness here is not that he used an image associated slavery but that he subjected his audience to rhetoric as simplistic and reductive as anything Mitt Romney writes on his whiteboard. But the real complaint seems to be that Biden was being inflammatory—not that Biden and Obama are angry themselves, but that they might make other people mad at Republicans. Artur Davis, a former Democratic Congressman who is now a Republican (and will speak at the G.O.P. convention), summed up the accusation by saying that Biden was accusing conservatives of “racial viciousness.”

I don't understand why Republicans can race bait to white people but Democrats get screamed at for similar things with black people.  Biden gave a poor line there, but in his own awkward way, he was making a point that Republicans are using outrageous language to whine about business regulation, when businesses have screwed lots of people in the past few years, and letting businesses run wild isn't going to make anything better for anybody.  And I can't really feel sorry for the folks who used the Willy Horton ad to scare people, or who go to Philadelphia, Mississippi and talk about states rights.  As Lee Atwater discussed how to use the English language without saying the obvious, he demonstrated Republican race-baiting at its worst:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

This has been Republican strategy throughout my lifetime.  The fact that blacks vote for Democrats has much less to do with Obama being black than with Republicans portraying blacks as the enemy to this country.  If Joe Biden ruffled some feathers and hurt some Republicans' feelings, so be it. I would like him to take a little higher road while campaigning, but Joe Biden will be Joe Biden.