Thread: The Last Gasp of White California? Democratic Chairman Art T

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=66378

OP-ED: The Last Gasp of White California? Democratic Chairman Art Torres Hears the Sound of Music

5/24/2006 5:58:00 PM


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To: State Desk, Opinion Editor

Contact: Jo Wideman of Californians for Population Stabilization, 805-564-6626

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., May 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following is an op-ed by Mark Cromer, of Californians for Population Stabilization:

It’s the kind of moment that harkens back to a different time and place in America.

A political leader stands on a stage, facing a crowd of hundreds of people who are the same color as he is, exhorting them with ethnically-laced appeals that stoke their fears, inflame their pride and incite their passionate belief that the ‘others’ are against them.

"Power is not given to you," the speaker warns. "You have to take it."

The crowd shouts its approval.

It could easily be vintage George Wallace, the Alabama governor who made a career as the political embodiment of white America’s reluctance to integrate.

Yet it’s not Wallace making a stridently racial appeal to rural whites on some long, hot day during a Freedom Summer four decades ago.

No, but it was another Democrat, playing to another fired-up Democratic crowd.

The speaker was Art Torres, the former California state assemblyman and senator who for the past decade has been the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. The occasion was a 1995 MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) ‘conference’ held at UC Riverside to devise a post-election strategy to oppose Prop. 187. Voters had overwhelmingly approved the initiative just months earlier.

Torres took to the stage with a host of other Latino activists and political leaders to denounce the passage of the proposition— which cut off most tax-supported social services to illegal immigrants.

Amid the stridently racialist rhetoric that marked the event, Torres took it a step further with a gleeful prognostication.

The voter backlash over the continuing human tidal waves of illegal immigrants into California was actually, according to Torres, good news for Latinos.

"Remember, (Prop.) 187 is the last gasp of a dying white America in California," Torres told the approving crowd. The 20 million-plus "dying whites" left in California may have had a different reaction to Torres’ daydreaming.

But it’s hard to imagine a white politician -- let alone the state chairman of a major political party -- surviving ten days after making such a pronouncement, let alone ten years. In all likelihood a Category Five media hurricane would make landfall in a matter of hours that would blow him out of office.

National Democratic Chairman Howard Dean was forced to recant and apologize on the 2004 campaign trail for daring to even reach out to the white guys who fly the Confederate flag, suggesting that they too shared the same concerns and needs as most Americans.

Senator Trent Lott’s lamentable salute to Dixiecrat curmudgeon Strom Thurmond cost him his majority leader job.

Even African American politicos are increasingly forced to tone down overt ethnic appeals, as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin recently discovered after boasting the Big Easy was and will remain ‘Chocolate City.’

Yet Torres has shown no compunction whatsoever at either blatantly pandering to Latinos with ethnically-charged appeals or of making common cause with strident Chicano radicals who preach ethnic separatism.

While no Anglo politico harboring hopes of a future would ever dare to share a stage with David Duke, the former Klansman-turned Louisiana state legislator, Torres hasn’t blinked in standing on stage with the likes of Armando Navarro, a UC Riverside professor and activist who makes no secret of his desire for a separate Latino homeland in the American southwest.

Indeed Torres joined Navarro at the 1995 rally, where Navarro told the crowd that Latinos would "take control" of California by 2015. In case anyone missed the point of what he meant, Navarro made it clear he was referring to a retaking of "Aztlan" -- the mythical Aztec homeland that Chicano separatists claim in the southwest.

Yet Torres has suffered virtually no significant media fallout from his own comments or those of Latino activists with whom he has publicly cavorted.

Syndicated columnist Jill Stewart, a veteran journalist who covers politics in California, attributes the radiant double- standard directly to the politics of the reporters themselves.

"They usually won’t write about it unless they disagree with it," Stewart said. "They look at reporting on something like this as a strictly ‘need-to-know’ matter, and they decide when and if the public needs to know it."

Stewart says the mainstream media’s reluctance to provide equitable coverage of the racially-charged rhetoric from a pol like Torres -- versus someone like Sen. Lott—has fueled the growth of alternative media.

"It’s this disparity in coverage that is really fueling the explosion of talk radio and the bloggers," she said. "Unfortunately, it is really hurting professional journalism."

While the passage of the still popular Prop. 187 (which even critics concede would likely pass again today) was far from the Anglo death rattle in California that Torres was hoping to hear; the silence of the reporters on his beat must truly be music to his ears.

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Mark Cromer is a senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (http://www.capsweb.org). He can be reached at Mrcromer@aol.com or info@capsweb.org.

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Yeah the double standard in reporting racist remarks like this is mind-boggling. I once worked for a major Texas newspaper and I got in many an argument with editors and writers over this issue. When UT Professor Louis Graglia (I think that was his name), way back in the late 90's, said that the academic disparity between Hispanics and whites/Asians was in his opinion due to Hispanics not looking down on academic failure, all hell broke lose. The newspaper was carrying on like this guy blew up the World Trade Center--for months!! They even started changing his original QUOTE, which is when I jumped in. Suddenly the quote was "Hispanics come from a culture of failure" and the editors just let it go.

Meanwhile people like Art Torres make far worse statements, while being paid on taxpayer money, and ten years later there still is virtually zero coverage anywhere.

I'm glad talk radio is getting the truth known. The internet is the Great Equilizer. You can bet the issue of illegal immigration would still be completely uncovered today if not for talk radio.