STEVE SCALESE IS BAD NEWS FOR AMERICA

CLOSET CAMPAIGNING

For most of us, Steve Scalese seems, at least in the nation press, to be in hot water for speaking to a radical racist group. His detractors cite this to imply he is a racist. Of course, the Speaker of the House defends him vigorously refused to remove him from his leadership position on that basis. He is the new Majority Whip in the United States House of Representatives; thus, we can class him as “our” leader or a VIP.

I would like to point out that treating what happened as negative for a political figure, such as Scalese, is a mistake. I call it the “Jessie Helms affect”. Many will remember the openly racist North Carolina Senator Jessie Helms.  He won election after election; after five elections (30 years) he held seniority; thus held powerful committee posts in the Senate. He exploited racial prejudice in his election campaigns. People seem to forget he was campaigning in North Carolina just as Steve Scalese is campaigning in Louisiana.

In the recent election in North Carolina, I stood in line waiting to vote; it was a white conservative district so the line was short and the voting machines were abundant. The candidate for U.S. Senate was Thom Tillis. He ran a vigorous campaign but, unlike in the Jessie Helms campaigns, I never heard the word “racist” used once in the entire campaign against liberal Kay Hagan. Truly, time have changed. Tillis had lead the State House of Representatives in voter suppression legislation and in shifting public funding to private schools and away from poor school districts, etc, which were clearly raciest based moves. By looking at who was voting, I knew Tillis would win; those in line were older white men; the classic description of white racists.

My point is simple, Jessie Helms may be dead, but his spirit lives on in Southern politics. Speaking to a hate group and then lying about it may end your political career in Northern district, but it is a powerful vote getter in the Deep South. The caveat is that this raciest, by virtue of repeated election, after only 8 years in congress, he is now in a senior leadership position in congress representing you and me.

His biography states;  Scalise . . . upholds the Constitution, advocating for the principles of fiscal discipline, lower taxes, an all-of-the-above national energy strategy, a robust national defense, and conservative values. Obviously, his conservative reading of the Constitution does not include equality among men—“we the people is a myth”—but does include cutting welfare programs and a bloated Pentagon budget. Boehner’s decision to keep him in political leadership is a “huge” step backwards. 

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