Dorchester County Council rescinded a resolution for more affordable health insurance Tuesday after complaints that it sounded too much like what Democrats have been proposing. —The Post and Courier, Sept. 5, 2007
Dorchester County has the reputation of being one of the most Republican places in one of the most Republican states in the nation.
How else to explain the logic of what council did last week? First, they endorsed an idea on its merits. Then they rescinded it because it sounded like something the Democrats might do!
“It was an honorable intent,” Councilmember Mike Murphree said of the resolution. “But when I read it more, it started to sound more and more like Hillary (Clinton) care. I think this is an issue that needs to be left to the Democrats, and I don’t want to be associated with them.”
So there you have it! It seems Mr. Murphree would rather look stupid than be associated with Democrats. After all, the resolution affirming a “health care crisis caused by increasing numbers of insured people, skyrocketing costs and limited access” seemed like a good idea two weeks earlier, when Murphree and a majority of county council endorsed it. And who could argue with calling on elected officials and candidates to “work together with consumers, businesses, and health care providers to ensure quality, affordable health care for everyone”?
Apparently Murphree and three other county council Republicans suddenly found it objectionable. I would bet my shoes that none of them saw Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko. One of the points that Moore makes is that the American Medical Association and other corporate interests have long used scare tactics and buzz words like “socialized medicine” to scare Americans away from better health care.
Murphree explained to The Post and Courier that he discovered the resolution is being driven by national and state organizations acting under the umbrella of the Service Employees International Union, which is pushing health care reform. Apparently that was enough to flip the four Republicans and kill the resolution.
What we witnessed in Dorchester County last week was remarkable only in its transparency. It is a perfect example of the way white Southerners have been thinking and acting politically for many generations. Because a good idea was associated with the Service Employees International Union, it was suddenly bad. And to make sure his constituents got the idea, he tied it to another symbol of all things reprehensible to southern whites — Hillary Clinton. Such reflexive reaction to certain groups, ideas and institutions is the sign of a fearful people.
Living in fear is what southern white people have been doing for centuries and it has distorted their culture, their politics, their logic. In the mind of so many white Southerners, everything has been reduced to bumper sticker reasoning, to the absolutes of good and bad: Conservatives are good. Liberals are bad. Republicans are good. Democrats are bad. The Confederate flag is good. The NAACP is bad. White southerners can march in lock step to that cadence and never lose a beat. And when an issue is complex — as the matter of health care surely is — they need only look for an identifying tag to know whether it’s good or bad. In the case of the Dorchester County resolution, it was vaguely attached to a labor union and as almost all white southerners can tell you, labor unions are bad, bad, bad! Ipso facto, the health care resolution was bad.
If you are a white politician, you must make clear to white voters how firmly, how resolutely, how irrevocably you stand on the side of good. If there is anything white southerners can’t abide, it’s a politician who empathizes with both sides of an issue.
In the case of Paul Campbell, who recently ran in a special election for state senate from Dorchester County, it was not enough that he tell the voters that he was a Republican. All candidates in the race but one were Republican. So Campbell had to demonstrate that he was more Republican than his rivals. He was, in fact, a “Rock Solid Republican,” according to his campaign signs. He was not a “smart Republican,” nor an “experienced Republican” or a “qualified Republican.” He was the most uncompromising Republican. And what was he uncompromising about? Well, that’s one of those codes that nobody can explain, but white southerners understand instinctively. They understood well enough to nominate and elect him overwhelmingly to the Senate. And I think Campbell would have understood instinctively that any health care resolution that is sponsored by a labor union is bad — no matter how reasonable it sounds.
This is the kind of logic that has been driving southern politics for a century and a half and until white southerners overcome their fear of the world, it will continue to hold us back.
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