Newsweek Rewrites History

"The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities." At least, that's how Newsweek's Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe see it in a fawning analysis of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy. The two tell us that Obama is "ready for the onslaught." "Yes, we know what's coming," he told a cheering crowd as he won the North Carolina primary last week. "We've seen it already … the attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences to turn us against each other for pure political gain—to slice and dice this country into Red States and Blue States; blue-collar and white-collar; white, black, brown."

If you needed an example of liberal media bias, you could find no better evidence than this story. To state as fact that the Republican Party has been "scaring voters since 1968" is to reduce the Newsweek duo's role as political analysts to nothing more than the partisan, Democratic cheerleaders they are. Let's not forget the role a southern Democratic governor and leading segregationist of his time played in that 1968 election. Nobody sought to divide the country more in 1968 than Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, a Democrat, who ran as an independent. In 1976, then-Gov. Jimmy Carter played the "values card" as he rallied evangelicals to his side and actually ran to the right of President Gerald Ford, a fact often overlooked by today's political analysts. In 1980, the Democrats ran a campaign of fear against that crazy old war monger Ronald Reagan, who they said was certain to bring about a nuclear Armageddon if he became president. Instead, Reagan's policies help put the old Soviet Union on the "ash heap of history" just as he predicted without firing a single missile and produced the first nuclear arms reduction agreement between the two countries. And wasn't George H.W. Bush's campaign about a "kinder, gentler nation."

Now, think about it. Which party plays on the fear of senior citizens losing their social security benefits? In almost every national election I can recall since I first started participating in politics back in 1976, the Democrats have accused Republican candidates of supporting a cut in social security benefits. It happened in the special election race this very year between Andre Carson and Jon Elrod. TV ads and direct mail pieces told the 7th District voters Jon Elrod supported a risky privatization scheme which would put their own benefits at risk. It was a flat out lie, but Carson, like all Democrats for the past half century, knows the benefit in playing on the fear of senior citizens, a reliable bloc of voters in every election. Class warfare politics has been the trademark of the Democratic Party for decades now. So it is absolutely insulting to Newsweek's shrinking number of subscribers for the magazine's top political analysts to make such an absurd assertion about the Republican Party. With this kind of reporting, Newsweek's credibility will diminish to the point it won't even be around for the next presidential election in 2012 with any luck.