Vivek Ramaswamy is too young to remember George Wallace. I remember him well, which is why Ramaswamy’s snarky effort to compare Gavin Newsom to him drove me to a refutation at New York:
The last time tech bro turned politician Vivek Ramaswamy waded into American political history, he was touting Richard Nixon as the inspiration for his own foreign-policy thinking, so to speak. Unfortunately, he betrayed a pretty thorough misunderstanding of what Nixon actually did in office, not to mention somehow missing the Tricky One’s own role model, the liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson.
Now the freshly minted candidate for governor of Ohio is at it again with an analogy aimed at Gavin Newsom that nicely illustrates the adage from This Is Spinal Tap that “there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.” He made this comparison on social media and on Fox News:
“I actually like Gavin Newsom as a person, but he won’t like this: there’s another Democrat Governor from U.S. history that he’s starting to resemble – George Wallace, the governor of Alabama who famously resisted the U.S. government’s efforts at desegregation. In 1963, JFK had to deputize the Alabama National Guard to get the job done, just like President Trump is doing now: – George Wallace fought against federal desegregation; Gavin Newsom now fights against federal deportations. – George Wallace wanted segregated cities; Gavin Newsom now wants for sanctuary cities. – George Wallace blocked school doors; Gavin Newsom blocks ICE vans. It’s the same playbook all over again: dodge the feds, rally the radicals, & do it in front of the cameras to pander to their base to carve out a lane for their presidential goals. And mark my words: Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambitions will end the same way George Wallace’s did – in the dustbins of history.”
Putting aside for a moment Ramaswamy’s dumb little quip about Newsom and George Wallace representing the same “Democrat governor playbook” (it would take all day simply to list the wild differences between these two men and the states and state parties they governed), his facile comparison of their stances toward the exercise of presidential power doesn’t bear any scrutiny at all. When George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to block the enrollment of two Black students at the University of Alabama, he was defying a nine-year-old Supreme Court decision, an untold number of subsequent lower-court decisions, and ultimately the 14th Amendment, on which Brown v. Board of Education was based. He wasn’t opposing the means by which the federal government sought to impose desegregation, but desegregation itself, and had deployed his own law-enforcement assets not only to obstruct desegregation orders, but to oppress and violently assault peaceful civil-rights protesters. That’s why President John F. Kennedy was forced to either federalize the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama or abandon desegregation efforts altogether.
By contrast, Newsom isn’t standing in any doors or “blocking ICE vans.” The deportation raids he has criticized (not stopped or in any way inhibited) are the product of a wildly improvised and deliberately provocative initiative by an administration that’s been in office for only a few months, not the sort of massive legal and moral edifice that gradually wore down Jim Crow. And speaking of morality, how about the chutzpah of Ramaswamy in comparing Trump’s mass-deportation plans to the civil-rights movement? Even if you favor Trump’s policies, they represent by even the friendliest accounting a distasteful plan of action to redress excessively lax immigration enforcement in the past, not some vindication of bedrock American principles. No one is going to build monuments to Tom Homan and Kristi Noem for busting up families and sending immigrants who were protected by law five minutes ago off to foreign prisons.
As he made clear in his speech last night, Newsom objects to Trump’s federalization of Guard units and planned deployment of Marines on grounds that they are unnecessary abrogations of state and local authority transparently designed to expand presidential authority as an end in itself. George Wallace made defiance of the federal government under either party’s leadership his trademark. John F. Kennedy wasn’t spitting insults at him as Trump is at Newsom; he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, negotiated constantly behind the scenes to avoid the ultimate confrontation with Wallace. There’s been nothing like that from Trump, who has all but declared war on California and then sent in the troops to run Los Angeles.
Beyond all the specifics, you can’t help but wonder why the very name “George Wallace” doesn’t curdle in Ramaswamy’s mouth. If there is any 21st-century politician who has emulated the ideology, the tactics, the rallies, the media-baiting, the casual racism, and the sheer cruelty of George Wallace, it’s not Gavin Newsom but Donald Trump. I understand Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t old enough to remember Wallace and his proto-MAGA message and appeal, but I am, and there’s not much question that if the Fighting Little Judge of 1963 was reincarnated and placed on this Earth today, he’d be wearing a red hat and cheering Trump’s assaults on what he described as the “anarchists … the liberals and left wingers, the he who looks like a she” and the professors and newspapers that “looked down their nose at the average man on the street.”
Look more closely at the Pew polls (pg 17-18), when they divide groups among certain bush/certain kerry and leaning bush/leaning kerry. Try this: first assume that only those who are “certain” about their choice will vote november and that their totals will be 100%. Next assume only those “certain” or “leaning” will show up in november (=100%) and no one who is now undecided would. In almost every group, Bush’s support among “certain” voters is worse than among “certain” + “leaning” voters. This tells me that those who will vote for Kerry are more determined than those who will vote for Bush. It also says that more of Bush’s numbers at this stage rely on soft support! It seems Bush is only going to have more and more trouble as more of his support is disheartened by his incompetence and more Americans line up behind Kerry, whom they will increasingly see as the better alternative. And that’s even before undecideds will break overwhelmingly for the challenger Kerry.
Bush is a lame duck, dead in the water! As Andrew Kohut’s NYTimes op-ed reassures us: Kerry is in a better position than any challenger in history against an elected incumbent (even though Bush clearly was not elected). Now let’s work on registering and mobilizing voters so we can give President Kerry the Democratic Congress he deserves!
I’m on Zogby’s email list for taking online polls. On the last few, I’ve stopped responding when I reached this question on the first page:
“In which party are you either registered to vote or do you consider yourself to be a member …
Democrat
Republican
Independent
Libertarian
Constitution
Green
Natural Law
Reform
Other
Not sure
Refused”
I encourage others to join me in sending an email to marc@zogby.com asking why they don’t have the DemocratIC party listed.
Thanks.