Linking MLK to GOP

Those wacky Republicans at the state party’s headquarters are at it again. A month after they were derided around the country for insinuating that Barack Obama is an Israel-hating Muslim—remember that “Anti-Semites for Obama” press release?—they have turned their gaze on the memory of Martin Luther King.

While the rest of the country was honoring King on the 40th anniversary of his assassination last week, the state GOP was trying to score a cheap political point by proclaiming that MLK was a Republican.

“Dr. King exhorted America to fully become a place where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and his fellow Republicans responded by passing civil rights legislation over the objection of many Democrats of that era,” state GOP chair Robin Smith said in a news release.

GOP flack Bill Hobbs acknowledges to the Scene that the party has no evidence of King’s political affiliation. “I’ve not seen his voter registration card,” he says. Why then does the GOP claim King as one of its own? Southern Democrats blocked social progress for blacks for decades and, historically, many blacks—including King’s father—belonged to the party of Abraham Lincoln, Hobbs says.

That’s true, but that changed when prominent Democrats such as the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson began to support civil rights. (King’s father raised money for JFK’s White House run.) No rational observer would claim with a straight face that King was a Republican during the ’60s. King openly criticized Republican Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential campaign.

“King didn’t speak to any particular party affiliation,” says Barbara Andrews, curator of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. “But certainly during the civil rights movement, his leaning would have been toward a more liberal, more open, more inclusive party affiliation, which would have been Democratic at that time.”

State Democratic Party spokesman Wade Munday says the GOP press release reduced King’s legacy to “an unprincipled partisan talking point.” Democratic Senate candidate Bob Tuke issued a statement last week calling it “an outrage” and demanding that Sen. Lamar Alexander denounce it. Alexander has refused comment to the Scene.

Governor goes MIAGov. Phil Bredesen, who imagines himself as a national Democratic Party leader, has popped up all over the TV political gab fests lately to talk about how to prevent an ugly Obama-Clinton fight at the convention in Denver this summer. But you would have been excused for wondering how much he cares about what’s happening at the state Capitol.

The House killed legislation last week to place moderate, new environmental safeguards on strip mining, and Bredesen admitted that, although he favors such restrictions, he wasn’t familiar with the bill.

“On the whole, some ways of managing the coal mining to minimize the damage…would be desirable,” the governor said, conceding he hadn’t helped the measure.

This comes after Bredesen refused to help pass the now-dead bill to put wine in grocery stores (although he’s for that too) and wouldn’t try to stop state pension fund managers from investing in Sudan despite genocide in Darfur. According to Bredesen, it’s more important to “professionally maximize” the state’s financial return than to take a moral stand against genocide.

“I think you get into very tricky waters if you start trying to tell pension fund managers to do anything but to professionally maximize their return,” Bredesen told The Tennessean. He said he opposed the idea of telling the fund managers, “Here’s a political consideration you have to take into account.”

Playing games with gunsEver wonder why so many people are cynical about politics? What happened last week in the legislature might help explain it.

First the state GOP demanded that lawmakers close to public view the names of Tennessee’s 190,000 handgun permit holders. Looking at the list, WTVF-Channel 5’s Phil Williams learned in February that convicted felons had been issued permits illegally because the state Safety Department wasn’t bothering to check their backgrounds. But “making those names publicly available is like giving criminals a shopping list and telling them who’s armed and who’s not,” GOP spokesman Bill Hobbs contends. It’s best to keep the criminals guessing, you know.

Then after shenanigans on both sides, House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh succeeded in killing the bill—and the GOP immediately asked for a copy of the still-public list. A fund-raising letter soon will land in the mailboxes of all handgun permit holders.

The GOP is already trying to raise money from others on the issue, decrying “another assault on the Second Amendment rights and security of gun owners and handgun carry permit holders in Tennessee.”