By Chris Satullo
“In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong.”
A quick thought on President Trump’s statement about those supporters of his who dangerously harassed a moving bus full of Biden volunteers on a Texas highway on Friday:
Anyone remember the New Black Panther Party?
On Election Day 2008, two members of this fringe group showed up at a polling place in lower North Philadelphia looking fierce and brandishing weapons. A concerned poll worker took a video, which found its way into the hands of a local GOP operative named Mike Roman. Remember the name.
Roman made sure the video found its way to Fox News and every conservative political blog in the land. By mid-afternoon, a firestorm had erupted in the conservative filter bubble about “voter intimidation” in Philadelphia. It was the rise of the “bad things happen in Philadelphia” meme that Trump has marketed so vociferously and baselessly in this election, as well as in 2016.
At the time, I was a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. I had an advantage over the breathless Red State pundits then hyperventilating about this supposed assault on our sacred democracy:
I knew something about Philadelphia and how it votes.
So I decided to look up some, you know, facts. Such as the fact that the Philadelphia election “divisions” – you might call them precincts where you live – that used this site at 12th Street and Fairmount as a polling place routinely delivered 95 percent or more of their votes to Democratic candidates. In other words, it was like most polling places in North Philly – deep, deep, deep blue.
So, if your dastardly plan had been to deploy two scary looking black people to dissuade John McCain voters from exercising their franchise, you could scarcely have picked a stupider place to roll out that scheme than 12th and Fairmount.
I filed a Philly.com blog post laying out the ward’s past voting record, and tried dutifully to share it in the comment sections of the various deep-red blogs that were hyping this “voter intimidation” scandal all day. Naïve, I know. It was a long time ago; I’ve long since learned that tossing facts at a raging conspiracy theory is futile.
Barack Obama won Pennsylvania over McCain by a little over 600,000 votes – so the theory that the New Black Panthers and their menacing berets were the key to his victory is about as ridiculous as…well, as everything Trump has said about voter fraud and “bad things in Philadelphia” ever since.
That hasn’t stopped GOP fraud hucksters from hyping the New Black Panthers fable as Exhibit A in their hyperbolic claims about Democratic Election Day skullduggery.
Who feeds Trump that fake “fraud” stuff? Well, remember the guy who peddled the New Black Panther video back in 2008? Mike Roman? Yeah, him. Today, he’s head of Trump’s election day operation, i.e. he’s the fraudmongerer-vote-suppressor-and-intimidator-in-chief.
Since he was the author of the phony conspiracy claim that has become the Ur-text of the GOP vote-fraud bible, I guess it makes sense.
I’ll give Roman this. He cut his teeth fulminating about a real Philly election scandal, the Democratic absentee-ballot fraud in the Second State Senate election in 1993, which was so bad it led a judge to overturn the election result. Clearly, the experience scarred Roman, leading him to see monsters under every voting machine.
But here’s the thing about those New Black Panthers: Yes, they had billy clubs and yelled not nice things at some white (and probably Democratic) voters. But they never touched anyone nor did anything remotely as reckless or dangerous as trying to run a bus full of people off a road or to block a major New York area bridge.
Yet they were the subject of a long-running Justice Department investigation and a court order. By contrast, the Texas perpetrators of reckless-endangerment-by-pickup-truck receive tweeted compliments from the White House. It’s a pretty stark example of how deep the Republican hypocrisy and projection about voter suppression goes.
Let’s just hope the results of this election show that their attempts at intimidation end up being as futile and trivial as the New Black Panthers’.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.