The politics of scaring white people finally fail

[DonViejo]

In New York, Republicans and the police commissioner kept invoking the bad old days, but this time it didn't work

BY ALEX PAREENE

Bill de Blasio is officially the next mayor of New York City. He won yesterday’s election decidedly and rather easily. Just a few months ago, he was considered a long-shot, in large part because one of his main campaign promises was that he’d fire New York’s broadly popular and nationally respected police commissioner. That promise turned out to be crucial to his success. Here’s hoping that this victory means the end of “scaring white people” as a viable and common New York City political tactic.

Republican mayoral nominee Joe Lhota’s general election campaign theme was, basically, that a vote for de Blasio is a vote for race riots. The theme, established in Lhota’s ads and echoed by his media allies in the New York Post, was that de Blasio will return New York to “the bad old days” of high crime. De Blasio will do this, apparently, by firing commissioner Ray Kelly and limiting stop-and-frisk, an NYPD policy that is little more than institutionalized minority-harassment. Once we stop stopping them, according to Lhota, they’ll return to causing trouble.

Lhota is, basically, a harmless, mild-mannered New York Republican from the corporate wing of the party, not a dedicated “law-and-order” nut like race-baiting crypto-fascist Rudy Giuliani. So his decision to allow his campaign to be fought on this issue above everything else is a curious one. Obviously one of his problems ws that New York Republican political operatives, consultants and strategists are pretty stupid and bad at winning elections. But not entirely stupid: The white vote is still nearly large enough on its own to win elections in New York, and scaring them has, traditionally, worked.

The key to all of Bloomberg’s victories was the white vote. His base, broadly, was Republicans, outer borough “white ethnics,” and rich liberal whites. Bloomberg’s victories depended on Democratic votes, obviously, because this is a Democratic city, and as CUNY’s Center for Community and Ethnic Media show in this analysis of New York elections, Bloomberg did particularly well, in 2009, in “white ethnic neighborhoods in the outer boroughs as well as more liberal white areas.” That wasn’t a fluke: “This 2009 general election pattern is not new — it has presented itself to some degree in each of the last three mayoral elections and even stretches back to the Koch elections of the 1980s.”

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/06/the_politics_of_scaring_white_people_finally_fail/