Senator Lindsey Graham with fellow GOP Senator John McCain
Senator Lindsey Graham is the latest in a long line of older white Republican men who don’t understand that the microphone is always on. Graham was caught on tape speaking before the all male, apparently all white Hibernian Society of Charleston, saying:
I’m trying to help you with your tax status. I’m sorry the government’s so fu#*ed up. If I get to be president, white men who are in male-only clubs are going to do great in my presidency.
Graham’s office quickly contacted the mainstream media and spun Graham’s statement as just a “joke taken out of context.” The problem is, Graham remarks further a well-known narrative that the Republican Party really is the party of old rich out-of-touch white men who gather in exclusive clubs. This narrative has been built up over years of similar elitist statements by white male Republicans caught on camera or an open microphone.
For example, two years ago, Republican presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney got into all kinds of trouble when his infamous “47 percent” video was leaked to the public. In the video, Romney stated:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the President [Obama] no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent that are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…. These are people who pay no income tax. 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. He’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich…. And so my job is not to worry about those people.
Coming on top of a long-established narrative that Romney was an out-of-touch elitist who had offshored jobs at Bain Capital and who had mansions, a car elevator and even a dressage horse that gave him and his wife a huge tax writeoff, Romney’s “47 percent” remarks were ultimately fatal to Romney’s campaign.
Six years earlier, another Republican presidential hopeful, former Senator George Allen of Virginia, had his infamous “Macaca” moment where Allen made a racial slur at a young man who was recording his campaign speech. The recording went viral on the Internet, confirming some people’s fears about white Republican men from the South, and Allen’s campaign crashed and burned.
Even future white male Republican President George W. Bush caused a stir when, dressed in white tie and tails, he addressed an identically dressed crowd of older rich white folks at the annual Al Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in 2000 and joked:
This is an impressive crowd: the ‘haves’ and the ‘have mores.’ Some people call you ‘the elite.’ I call you ‘my base.’
In addition to these politicians, rich old white male Republican media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly constantly reveal their bias toward other rich old white male Republicans. Moreover, in all of these examples, sometimes the Republican knows he is being recorded and sometimes he doesn’t, and yet he still makes the remarks. The question some voters may be asking is, which is worse, a Republican white man who makes such elitist remarks when he thinks he isn’t being recorded, or one who knows his statements are being recorded but makes them anyway?
Lindsey Graham had little chance of winning the Republican Party nomination for President, and his remarks will not likely hurt his 2014 Senate re-election bid. But Graham’s statements could further damage the Republican Party, which, just days before the 2014 Election, knows it has an image problem and hardly wants to remind voters that it caters primarily to rich old white men.
Photo by isafmedia, used under Creative Commons license. http://is.gd/yaPMPq
