It is a sign of the times that an African-American Republican, Herman Cain, is leading by double digits in South Carolina, the heart and soul of the Old Confederacy, a hotbed of the Neo-Confederate tea-party movement today and an early primary state next year.
According to an InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research poll [PDF] of likely South Carolina voters conducted for the Augusta (S.C.) Chronicle on Oct. 16, Cain leads second-place candidate Mitt Romney 32-16 percent. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a sometimes advocate of secession, is a close third with 12 percent, while also-rans New Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmman and Jon Huntsman bring up the rear in single digits. Rick Santorum, the single-issue, anti-gay candidate, failed to muster even 1 percent support.
(It is unclear why 17 Democrats were included in a poll about the Republican primary, but Cain led among these Democrats with nearly 55 percent while Michele Bachmann trailed among Dems, with 22.5 percent.)
So what does Cain’s ascendancy say about the Republican Party and its tea party base, with its nearly all-white, mostly middle-aged demographics? Jonathan Chait explains:
What Cain’s polling surge does tell us is the central place that race occupies in the conservative psychology. The liberal narrative of race in America flows from Lyndon Johnson’s famous comment in 1964 that committing the Democratic Party to supporting civil rights, after decades of upholding white supremacy, would turn the South Republican. Conservatives view this as a calumny. In the Republican view, they are not the direct lineal descendants of the white southern reactionaries who upheld segregation, but equal heirs to the legacy of Martin Luther King. Indeed, they are even the more true heirs, because they see the world in color-blind terms as King desired, rather than constantly using race as a weapon the way liberals do.
The emergence of Barack Obama upon the national scene activated the conservative sense of racial persecution. Obama himself has referred to race only rarely, but in the right-wing mind, he is endlessly accusing his political opponents of racism. Cain’s candidacy offers the perfect balm for this festering wound upon the conservative psyche. Here is Cain saying, over and over again, what conservatives believe — that Obama uses his race to delegitimize criticism of any kind.
What more credible messenger could exist to point out this dastardly tactic? And then, by disarming Obama of his most effective weapon, conservatives believe they can finally combat him on even ground and expose the failure of his ideas.
Cain’s candidacy is putatively non-racial. Both he and his supporters insist that his popularity solely reflects the power of his ideas. As conservative pundit Mona Charen puts it [in a column titled “‘Racists’ for Cain“]:
“It wasn’t that Republicans and conservatives were acting upon an affirmative action spirit — trying to prove that they too could pull the lever for a black guy. It’s that Herman Cain delivers a great speech, is willing to propose solutions commensurate with our problems, and is possessed of a remarkably sunny personality.”
Why, then, does Cain get a pass on his proposal to raise taxes? Under his 9-9-9 plan, if you live in a state with an 8 percent sales tax, your sales tax will go up to 17 percent. If you live in a state with no sales tax, your sales tax will rise 100 percent.
What is telling here is that the tea party is not for anything. They are an opposition movement. The central target of their opposition is Pres. Obama, about whom they have created one paranoid conspiracy after another. But they also rail against government in general and of taxation specifically. Remember the signs they carried: “Taxed Enough Already” — remember the “no new taxes” pledge their elected officials took en mass for Republican uber-nerd (and Fanny Mae lobbyist) Grover Norquist?
In fact, until now, tea partyists and their poodles in the GOP leadership have taken such a hard line on raising taxes that even closing the loopholes used by billionaires and mega-corporations to zero out their tax liability has been verboten.
Suddenly, however, the Republican base supports a plan to raise the sales tax nationwide. It is fair to say that if any other Republican candidate — Mitt Romney, for example — had proposed raising taxes this year, he or she would have been driven out of the race by enraged, spittle-spewing tea-party mobs.
So why does Herman Cain — and on no else — get a pass on his 9-9-9 plan that even he admits would cause taxes to go up?
What I’ve heard is that people like the “simplicity” and seeming fairness of what sounds like a flat tax. Except, except, except it ain’t simple and it ain’t fair. This is how the little folks get screwed, and help screw themselves, by accepting the quick fix instead of the long-term solution. Cain is offering symbolic crack as a means to make people feel better; Obama is offering the equivalent of a low-fat diet and more exercise.
The real shame of it, is that a black republican is probably the only candidate who would be able to raise taxes without fervent opposition. But, the way he is proposing would wreak havoc on our economy. Lord help us from ourselves.