Republican Truth in Advertising

By GENE NICHOL

Election day is less than 90 days away. Political ads now seek, in earnest, to persuade reluctant audiences. There is much to regret in this. We all, I’m sure, have our particularized peeves at the way the process unfolds.

One of mine is the odd tendency of political candidates to happily advertise themselves as the complete antithesis of what their entire legislative record decisively proves them to be. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) is off to a notable start on this front. Tillis’ opening venture, an apparent biographical effort, highlights the senator’s asserted humble beginnings and concludes: “We’ll bring this economy back and I’ll remember who needs it the most.” Tillis for the little guy. No kidding.

This is the same fellow that, as speaker of the N.C. House, made it illegal to expand Medicaid, enacted the largest cut to a state unemployment compensation program in American history, and made sure that we became the only state ever to abolish its earned income tax credit – punishing working families making about $35,000 a year. (Not to mention his nasty swipes, last week, at Hispanic COVID victims.) Tillis campaigning to protect low income Tar Heels is like Donald Trump running on a truth and constitutionalism platform.

But the senator assumes we have short memories. And he knows we don’t expect politicians to tell the truth.

That got me thinking. What if our lawmakers did fess up to their actual deeds? What if they suddenly embraced the long-forgotten notion of truth in advertising? Imagine, if you can.

The whole world is talking about race in this “reckoning.” As James Baldwin once put it: “We shall force our (white) brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.” Over the past decade, the North Carolina General Assembly has waged the stoutest war against African-Americans seen since the Jim Crow era. What if our Republican lawmakers owned up to their crusade in a TV commercial? It might go something like this:

“Hi Tar Heels. We speak to you as the white people’s caucus. You’ll be glad to know that when we repair to our private caucus sessions, to write the rules for North Carolina, there are no black people, no people of color in attendance. All our members are white. It’s quite the group photo.”

“A lot of malcontents complain about bias in the criminal justice system. We’ve shown how to deal with that. We simply repealed the Racial Justice Act. We made it clear that when there’s race discrimination in criminal trials, we don’t want to hear about it.”

“There’s also much grumbling about Confederate statues. We passed a law making it illegal to remove them. As Republican co-sponsor Sen. Tommy Tucker explained, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, “it was caused by the North and their tariffs over southern goods.”

“In order to assure our own power, as the courts specifically held, we passed one of ‘the largest racial gerrymanders ever confronted” by a federal tribunal. We amended election laws ‘with surgical precision’ to disenfranchise black voters. As a federal court put it, no other legislature in America ‘has ever done so much, so fast, to restrict the franchise.’”

“We overturned Greensboro city council elections, another court ruled, to discriminate against black voters and candidates. We moved to increase racial segregation in public schools, made it harder to review police cam video, and so much more. So get on board. Cast a vote to be proud of. Lock arms with the white people’s party. Let’s build a bridge to 1953.”

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2020

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