Yo! Bad Republican Optics, Sen. Tim Scott & Michael the Black Man

African-American reach-out, Republican style?
Sen. Tim Scott tries to bamboozle black folks

The word of the day for me is optics.

Not the kind of optics associated with a complex scientific instrument like NASA's Hubble Telescope, which has been orbiting above our beloved planet since 1990 and to date has sent back hundreds of thousands of images and resulted in the publication of over 10,000 scientific research articles and papers.

No, I'm talking about the kinds of optics associated with political perception.

It defies belief that out of all the hyper-wealthy conservative members of the U.S. Senate, the braintrust of the Republican Party would trot out South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (the only African-American Republican in the Senate) to appear on-camera deceptively touting the GOP's "tax reform" plan as benefitting working and middle class Americans - then have him end it with the cringe-worthy catchphrase "#KeepYoMoney".

Not your, yo.

By the way my mom grew up in West Philly when African-Americans, Italian-Americans and Jews still lived in the same neighborhoods, Italian guys from Philly have been calling out Yo! to each other for decades.

Want to get hammered?

Watch the 1976 film Rocky and take a drink every time the title character, South Philly boxer Rocky Balboa, played by Sylvester Stallone, says "Yo!"

Now it's bad enough that the Republican-majority House and Senate have yet to pass a single piece of substantive legislation despite having the political "trifecta" benefit of having a Republican president in office - but they offer up their only black Senator to deliver an insulting catchphrase to bolster the illusion that their "tax reform" is not just a big tax cut for the rich?

As Gail Collins noted in her New York Times column yesterday, when White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former Goldman-Sachs executive who is one of the architects of the Republican "tax reform" effort, was asked if he could assure members of the working and middle class that their taxes wouldn't increase under the Republican plan he said he couldn't "guarantee that." 

So says the guy who received a whopping $285 million severance package when he exited Goldman-Sachs to join the Trump White House - no need to speculate on how much Gary's personal tax bill will shrink under the plan he's helping to craft. Cha-Ching!

Sen. Tim Scott delivering the "Keep yo money"
punchline on Wednesday in D.C.

What's really pathetic about all this Senator Scott tomfoolery is that I'm honestly not sure if the Republicans who thought up this latest PR disaster realize that it only reinforces their image as a bunch of culturally-oblivious stiffs who are perpetually and painfully out of touch with mainstream Americans.

As if having the black guy throw out a casual colloquialism commonly associated with African-American slang would suddenly convince people of color that Republicans have the interests of average Americans in their cold, compassionless hearts. 

Especially given that that the current tax overhaul being touted by Republican politicians in Washington, which seeks to radically lower the corporate tax rate, eliminate the estate tax and do away with the alternative minimum tax, is basically a mechanism for redistributing over $1.2 trillion in wealth to corporations and America's top earners.

Putting Tim Scott out there to promote the lie that Republican "tax reform" will benefit working and middle class Americans strikes me as culturally klutzy - it's not like he's a "man of the people".

As Jamelle Bouie observed in an article about Scott for Slate back in 2014, Scott's brand of "colorblind conservatism" is far more suited to the conservative white South Carolina constituents who elected him to office than it is to the mostly black South Carolina Democrats who overwhelmingly voted against him and his Tea Party policy positions. 

After all, Scott is the guy who introduced legislation that would cut off food stamps to any American worker whose wages were affected because of participation in a strike, as a then-member of the House, he voted against the 2011 deal to raise the debt ceiling to keep the government functioning.

He's basically a Tea Party guy who avoids speaking out on divisive racial issues like the controversial police killings of unarmed African-Americans like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown - so it's disingenuous for the Republicans to trot him out as the public mouthpiece of a hokey phrase like "Keep yo money" when black voters in his own state don't even vote for him.

One doesn't have to point out the racist, misogynist xenophobe the Republican Party nominated as it's 2016 presidential candidate to recognize that the GOP has long since abandoned any pretense of concerning itself with the major policy issues concerns impacting people of color. 

Maurice Symonette (AKA "Michael the Black Man") 
at Trump's rally in Phoenix back in August  

Amongst the unsavory leftovers still remaining from Trump's toxic 2016 presidential campaign, few are more disingenuous or laughable than his pathetic attempts to reach out to the African-American community.

This was true long before Trump stood at a podium at a campaign appearance in the mostly white Lansing, Michigan suburb of Dimondale, shrugged his shoulders with that smirk and pitched black American voters with the question: "What have you got to lose?"

Not surprisingly a mere 8% of African-Americans voted for Trump - I've yet to meet one of them.

His actions and statements since his inauguration have demonstrated that not only does he not give a rat's ass about people of color, Hispanics and Muslims, he's openly played footsie with fringe white supremacists by, among other things, hiring at least four as top White House advisers and describing the alt-right "Tiki Torch Nazis" parading around Charlottesville with swastika imagery chanting "Jews will not replace us" as "decent people."

So I found it really odd that out of the approximately 4,100 people at that bizarre Trump rally in Phoenix back in August, a strange black guy named Maurice Symonette (who also posts online videos as Michael the Black Man) wearing a "Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist" t-shirt holding a "Blacks For Trump" sign just happened to be standing just behind the Rambler-in-Chief - where the cameras caught him fawning, oohing and cheering at virtually everything that was said.

As Nina Golgowski reported for the Huffington Post back in August, Symonette used to go by the name Maurice Woodside when he was a member of a cult called the Temple of Love led by a man named Yahweh ben Yahweh who enticed Symonette into joining the cult by walking up to him and saying "All white people are the Devil." - ben Yahweh was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder.

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke

Symonette, who promotes a range of loony right-wing conspiracy theories, has frequently been seen photographed with his "Blacks For Trump" sign positioned in sight of the camera in ways that strongly suggest he's intentionally placed there by campaign staff and is quite likely paid to do so.

The only other black people I can think of that offer such enthusiastic support of Trump is the Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke who vilifies Black Lives Matter as a terrorist group.

You may recall his unhinged speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and recently his department came under fire after inmate Terill Thomas died in his cell after intentionally being denied water for 7 days.

The cowboy hat-wearing conservative firebrand has also drawn criticism from military veterans for festooning his police uniform with an assortment of pins and badges that have nothing to do with his actual service; including a Harley Davidson pin on his lapel according to a detailed analysis of his uniform decorations by the Washington Post.

Trump's African-American supporters also include former candidate on The Apprentice, Omarosa Manigault, who served as the Trump campaign's "director of African-American outreach" (when 88% of black Americans voted for Hillary...) and now serves in the White House in a position that really isn't all that clear - she's the one who proudly boasted that Trump has a list of "enemies."

It's weird enough that Trump is holding political rallies for the 2020 presidential race eight months into one of the most disastrous, unproductive and unpopular presidencies in U.S. history, but the fact that his most prominent black supporters are basically fringe right-wingers with views considered far outside the mainstream is a pretty sad indication of how widely despised he is by people of color in America - and how divisive he is as a president.

When you couple that with the Republican Party trotting out their only black Senator to try and bamboozle working and middle class Americans into believing that the GOP's tax cuts are going to put more money into their pockets, it's clear the Republicans have a huge optics problem.

What's not so clear is whether they're aware of it.

Tea Partier Tim Scott Appointed to US Senate as Spielberg's 'Lincoln' Paints a Different Portrait of the Republican Party

Rep. (now Senator) Tim Scott (R-SC)

I finally got to go see the movie 'Lincoln' last night, what a vivid examination of a pivotal moment in American history; exceptional film making, great script and an amazing cast.

I think there are some fascinating and very relevant parallels between Steven Spielberg's brilliant portrayal of the intense philosophical/political debates surrounding the passage of the 13th Amendment banning slavery, the current identity crisis facing the Republican party and the growing cries for more assertive gun control legislation.

Enter newly-appointed Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley's decision on Monday to appoint conservative Congressman and Tea Party poster boy Tim Scott to replace Senator Jim DeMint certainly represents a watershed moment for the GOP, but it's also historic for the nation as a whole.

The 47 year-old Scott, who rose from poverty in North Charleston, SC to become a prominent hard-line conservative member of the House of Representatives, is the first African-American Senator from a southern state to join the US Senate since Mississippi Republicans  Hiram Rhodes Revels (who served from 1870-1871) and former slave Blanche Bruce (who served from 1871-1885) as part of the wave of 23 black Congressmen elected during the Reconstruction Era beginning with John Willis Menard of Louisiana in 1868. 

While Haley rightfully and enthusiastically asserted Scott's qualifications for the Senate seat, in terms of political strategy the move is no surprise in the wake of the pasting the GOP took in the last Presidential election amongst African-American, Hispanic and Asian voters. With a stunning 90% of black Americans casting their votes for President Obama (and overwhelming Hispanic and Asian votes as well) this past election was as much a warning as a wake-up call for today's Republican party.

It's hard to ignore the ties between the historic significance of Scott's election to the Senate and the lofty dialog between politicians debating a post-slavery America in 1865 in  'Lincoln', which interestingly enough, is in nationwide release at the very moment the Republican party is reeling from it's unwavering support of the NRA in the wake of the shootings in Newton, the ongoing battle over raising taxes on the wealthy and the impending fiscal cliff in Washington.

Spielberg scores not just with a revealing portrait of Abraham Lincoln, but by carefully reminding his audience that the Republican party weren't always characterized by the ideologically rigid, culturally intolerant extremists who control today's GOP.

In this nation it was Republicans who were once the ones who fought tooth and nail for passage of an Amendment to the Constitution that would outlaw slavery and establish the difficult pathway towards citizenship and equal rights for the millions of African-Americans struggling to escape the horror of generations of indentured servitude in this nation.

In the same way Republicans in the late 1860's and early 1870's sent black Congressmen and Senators to Washington as duly elected representatives of the people in an effort to cement the gains won by hundreds of thousands of Americans during the Civil War, I get the sense today's GOP leaders looked at the results of the 2012 Presidential elections and quietly decided there's no future in being a political party that cannot appeal to and serve ALL Americans.

Maybe (just maybe), in the appointment of African-American Congressman Tim Scott to one of the two US Senate seats of South Carolina, (the very state where the first shots were fired by the Confederacy against Union forces entrenched in Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 to begin the Civil War), there are voices within the Republican leadership seeking to reconnect the GOP to it's roots as the Party of Lincoln as it was once known.

Is it possible the appointment of Scott signals the start of a different kind of battle for the soul of the Republican party? Maybe. There's no question that right now the GOP itself seems enslaved; to Grover Norquist, the NRA, to the rejection of science and reason; to an ideology that seems increasingly out of step with mainstream Americans.

No matter how conservative you are politically, it's got to be hard to reconcile the party that once led the fight to pass the 13th Amendment with the slew of intolerant polarizing extremists like Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D'Souza, Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump or even some of the Senators who will serve with Tim Scott that define today's Republican Party.     

Maybe somewhere, the great American statesman and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens is allowing himself just an inkling of hope that what once was might someday come to pass again; and the nation will be the better for it.