The Death of a Red State

Even worse is Donna Gallup, a GOP candidate for the state House. A stocky, anti-communist schoolmarm, Gallup gives a speech opposing "laws that blindly give criminals the opportunity to molest the innocent in public restrooms." It turns out she's referring to a bill that protects gays and lesbians from discrimination. Afterward, I ask Gallup what the hell the bill has to do with molestation. "If you're perceived to be gay," she says, "then you can go into a public restroom without any hostility toward you, according to this law."

Only in America can a bill making it safe for gay people to take a piss inspire fear of "criminals" molesting the "innocent."

After this show, it's a letdown when Musgrave takes the stage. The district's headline Republican has abandoned the rhetoric that made her famous, not once mentioning gay marriage or any social issues at all. She seems nervous, and her rants against Wall Street and the congressional bailout sound flat, like John Kerry trying to act religious.

But when you listen to Musgrave's supporters, you still hear a lot of the railing against them and those people that Republicans like Peck Corry and Gallup are feeding the crowd, and which Musgrave herself rode into office years ago. "If we all have to follow the law, they should too," says one Musgrave supporter at the rally, a former Air Force sergeant, in reference to illegal immigrants. When I ask about Sarah Palin's claim that Obama doesn't see America as "you and I" do, the 70-year-old agrees. "They don't appreciate America," he says.

This is why the makeover of someone like Marilyn Musgrave might be too little, too late. Racism and prejudice have festered at the core of the political identity of a generation of Republicans; you can't simply excise those qualities from them overnight. Back them into a corner and they always produce a Willie Horton or a Bill Ayers or some other contagious graduate of the "University of Negroes and Communists" (as Jesse Helms once called his home-state school, UNC) ready to infect that never-was paradise of white culture with "crime" or "irresponsibility" or whatever the code word happens to be this week. They're trying it even now, with the McCain campaign running ads showing Obama next to photos of a former Fannie Mae chairman who happens to be black but was never an adviser to Obama. "Shocking," says the ad, as shots of the two black men fade to a picture of an aggrieved elderly white woman.

These tactics almost always worked in the past and have carried more than one man into the most powerful office in the world. But they were a house of cards all along, with no substance behind them, and when they are at last put to a vote next month, they'll blow away forever. That's what happens with weak ideas: They don't die a slow, lingering death but lose their power all at once, like a broken spell.

[From Issue 1064 — October 30, 2008]