George Allen, up for a 2006 Strommy Award

[tgnyc]

Senator George Allen of Virginia is now officially the leading contender for 2006 Strommy Award, which recognizes the American elected official displaying the most distressingly backwards attitudes and behaviors on matters of race for the preceding year. The award is named after Strom Thurmond, the late US Senator from South Carolina who set the American record for Senate filibusters of 24 hours, 18 minutes in an effort to block passage of a 1957 civil rights bill. Previous winners have included Trent Lott, John Ashcroft, and George W. Bush.

{SNIP}

Why did so many savvy political observers consider a racist jerk like Allen to be leading contender for the presidency of the United States?

First of all, Allen has remade himself in the image of an "authnetic" Southerner. And in American presidential politics, being from the South is the ultimate trump card. Unfortunately.

For reasons that people more schooled in American anthropology than we are can better explain, the South continues to cling to the cultural tribalism that led to its disasterous attempt to secede from the United States a century-and-a-half ago. These tribal sensibilities were triggered with explosive force when Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act acknowledging the humanity and protecting the basic rights of the nation's black citizens.

From that moment forward, and to this day, no one has ever been elected US president without being either Republican or from the South. As with George W. Bush, anyone claiming both of those heritages gets an automatic first-round bye past the credibility stage.

How is it that one region of the United States can so completely seize control of the presidential selection process? We have our old friend the Electoral College to thank for that. The College distorts the will of America's voters by forcing them into intra-state battles in which the winning candidate within each state takes all of that state's support.

Most (no, of course not all, but most) Southern white voters, still stinging from their twin loses of the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, reliably vote only for presidential candidates they feel will not use the powers of the government to make special efforts to address the secondary status of blacks in America: Republicans, and fellow Southerners.

Readers who think we are being unfair or are overgeneralizing need to come up with an alternative plausible explanation for why the only presidential nominee to win even one Southern state since 1964 without being Southern or Republican was Hubert Humphrey, who was the incumbent Vice President under president Johnson, a Southerner from Texas. The only Southern state Humphrey won: Texas.

more at www.intelligencesquad.com/id147.html

[valerief]

1. They-All-Look-Alike Trent Lott should be nominated, too. n/t