Mother Jones reports today:
Top social-conservative strategist Ralph Reed compared President Barack Obama to segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.That comes a day after this:
"Fifty years ago George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and said that African-Americans couldn't come in," said Reed, the founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, in response to the Department of Justice's attempt to block Louisiana's school voucher program.
"Today, the Obama administration stands in that same door and says those children can't leave. It was wrong then and it was wrong now and we say to President Obama, 'Let those children go.'" ...
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) on Thursday criticized Attorney General Eric Holder for trying to "stand in the schoolhouse door" and keep minority students from attending charter schools, an allusion to segregationist and former Alabama Gov. George Wallace.These pronouncements echo a National Review editorial from last fall:
"We've got Eric Holder and the Department of Justice trying to stand in the schoolhouse door to prevent minority kids, low-income kids, kids who haven’t had access to a great education, the chance to go to better schools," Jindal said at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as recorded by the Huffington Post....
Obama vs. EducationAnd Obama and his administraton don't just resemble George Wallace on school issues, according to the right. Here's John Hinderaker at Power Line arguing last month that -- no, I'm not making this up -- the right of billionaires to spend unlimited and untraceable cash on political campaigns is like the right of blacks in the Jim Crow South to attend integrated schools:
It was 50 years ago this June that George Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama, made his infamous "stand in the schoolhouse door" to prevent two black students from enrolling at an all-white school. His slogan was "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
These many years later, Democrats still are standing in the schoolhouse door to prevent black students from enjoying the educational benefits available to their white peers, this time in Louisiana instead of Alabama. Playing the Wallace role this time is Eric Holder, whose Justice Department is petitioning a U.S. district court to abolish a Louisiana school-choice program that helps students, most of them black, to exit failing government schools
The Obama administration is a serial offender on this issue....
BARACK OBAMA: THE GEORGE WALLACE OF FREE SPEECHNice talk, Republicans.
The Supreme Court decided Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, but prominent Democrats in the South refused to accept the court's ruling. For a decade thereafter, Democrats like Ross Barnett, Lester Maddox and George Wallace did everything they could to perpetuate race discrimination in public education. In one notorious instance in 1963, Democratic Governor Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door to personally block African-American students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.
Something similar is happening with the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, a landmark of First Amendment jurisprudence. Democrats refuse to accept the decision; Barack Obama denounced it in a State of the Union speech, and his example has been followed by many other Democrats -- nearly all of whom, it should be added, misrepresent that case's holding as they criticize it. Bitterly hostile to free speech when exercised by their political opponents, Democrats have done whatever they can to undermine Citizens United, just as they did decades ago with Brown vs. Board of Education.
The I.R.S. scandal can best be seen in this light. The Democrats are using the levers of the executive branch, particularly the I.R.S., to deter Americans from exercising the First Amendment rights that were guaranteed them by the Supreme Court....
So ... how's that outreach to black voters coming along?
