Backstory: Planting the seeds of controversy

By Michael Green

Life never was fun on the old plantation. According to County Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald, it still isn't. According to Democrats, she's talking about the wrong plantation.

Once upon a time, historians thought slaves had it great--working all day in the sun, provided with food and shelter, given Sundays off to listen to preachers tell them the Bible approves slavery and preaches obedience to their masters. Those historians tended to believe in racial inferiority and their main sources were the records and diaries of the planters, whose view of slavery was a trifle skewed.

Then along came revisionist historians--you know, the people George W. Bush and Lynne Cheney, his supervisor's wife, have attacked for suggesting everything in the past wasn't rosy. The revisionists figured out that slaves were beaten, badly fed, overworked and very, very unhappy.

Recently, Boggs McDonald, who is African-American, brought plantations into local politics, which usually is far from those places. She derided the Democratic Party as "the one last plantation in America." She accused Democrats of taking blacks for granted and expecting them just to toe the party line. She expressed regrets that she ever was a Democrat, a party she left just more than five years ago after losing a state Assembly race. Other local black Republicans voiced support for her stand.

Some disagreed, to put it mildly. Her African-American commission colleague, Democrat Yvonne Atkinson Gates, called her comments "irresponsible." Other African-Americans--mostly Democratic, as you might expect--echoed her.

The bipartisan Caucus of African-American Nevadans asked Boggs McDonald to come explain herself, since she had received its endorsement. She said she was sorry if anyone had been offended, but she stood by her position that Democrats take blacks for granted. Some in the caucus agreed and some disagreed.

Well, many should be offended. And many should stop and think, because Boggs McDonald is right--partly.

The offense is invoking slavery. Now, it might read like the beginning of a bad ethnic joke to say Boggs McDonald has more right than I do to say whatever she wants about slavery. But we're all familiar with code language, racist, sexist and otherwise. When you mention a plantation, slavery is what comes to mind. If Boggs McDonald used reservations or concentration camps for the sake of comparison, Native Americans and Jews would be unlikely to have the same reaction as African-Americans or WASPs.

Nor are Democratic hands entirely clean. That party supported slavery or tolerated it while Republicans tried to restrict it. But during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln and his fellow Republicans needed votes to amend the Constitution to end slavery, Democrats provided them. After the war, Democrats did their best to reinstitute slavery in all but name. Republicans fought the good fight but finally gave up trying to reform not only Southerners out to keep blacks from exercising their constitutional rights, but Northerners who agreed or didn't care.

For these reasons, those African-Americans who could vote backed Republicans until the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal did too little for blacks, but it did enough to earn their support. And Democrats retained that support. It became even stronger after Lyndon Johnson pushed through civil rights legislation.

Republicans contributed to that effort. Some of them backed civil rights, counteracting the opposition of Southern Democrats. But since then, Republicans have appealed to racism directly and indirectly, from Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to the Willie Horton ads that helped the only Bush elected president.

Today, black Republicans are few. When Boggs McDonald ran for the House in 2002, party leaders touted her as a rising star. She also would have been the only black Republican in Congress. There still isn't one, and there won't be after this November, either.

As one of the caucus members Boggs McDonald addressed noted, Democrats expect blacks to vote for them. As another noted, though, Democratic policies do more for African-Americans than what Republicans do. While both parties are far too corporate and establishment-oriented, Democrats grasp that on the average, blacks face far more economic problems than whites. They also need affirmative action--based not on race, but on class, to level the playing field for the poor of all races. The only affirmative action most Republicans support is the kind that helps the children of Yale graduates.

Let's set aside the irony that Boggs McDonald received an African-American group's endorsement, although it's possible that her policies might benefit blacks less than would her opponent's. Democrats shouldn't need to tell blacks that their economic and social policies are more beneficial to everyone, including them, any more than they should have to tell women that most Republicans want them to go to back alleys or use coat hangers for abortions.

But as the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill once recalled, when he took a neighbor's vote for granted, she told him that "people like to be asked."

So, Boggs McDonald may have provided a useful reminder to Democrats that they should be asking for votes rather than taking them for granted. Her opponent, David Goldwater, who's likely to mention her and her husband's controversial work history now that she has brought up his past peccadilloes, might tell black voters that what matters most is not the color of one's skin, but the content of one's character--and whether that character expresses itself in the right policies.