I see Rep Steve King (R-IA), accused white supremacist, has decided to shore up his support in his district, as CNN reports:
Republican Rep. Steve King, who has a lengthy history of incendiary comments related to race, favorably compared the response of his Iowan constituents, who are majority white, to recent severe flooding to the residents of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, who were majority black.
Speaking at a town hall in his district Thursday, King suggested that Hurricane Katrina disaster victims were asking for government assistance after the deadly storm hit, pushing a racial stereotype.
“Here’s what FEMA tells me. We go to a place like New Orleans, and everybody’s looking around saying, ‘Who’s going to help me? Who’s going to help me?'” King said, adding that he made four trips to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
“We go to a place like Iowa, and we go, we go see, knock on the door at, say, I’ll make up a name, John’s place, and say, ‘John, you got water in your basement, we can write you a check, we can help you.’ And John will say, ‘Well, wait a minute, let me get my boots. It’s Joe that needs help. Let’s go down to his place and help him,'” King said.
I won’t bother to explore the point that a bit of flooding, damaging as it is to the nation’s food industry, has any comparison to a direct hit by a major hurricane. The farmers have a little water in their basement. In New Orleans, their houses were underwater. Add in the bit that New Orleans, being below sea level, probably shouldn’t exist in that location due to its vulnerability to disaster, and his comparison is laughably specious.
But It’s worth taking a moment to dissect everything going on here.
First, he’s praising his constituents in a time of stress. Remember, King’s margin of victory in the recent mid-terms was nothing to brag about, compared to his previous victories. Since then, he’s been stripped of his committee assignments by his own Party as punishment for being too explicit concerning his white supremacist views.
Second, anyone who’s part of a community wants to believe their community is great[1]. King is busily building up the ego of his constituents by suggesting they do the right thing, in contrast to other people.
Third, and related to the previous, Iowa is overwhelmingly populated by descendants of Western Europeans. New Orleans, rightly or wrongly, is considered a ‘black’ city. King’s tactic is a just-below-the-surface irritation of latent racism, another attempt to smear a city of others with a reputation for laziness and dependency. This is a time-worn tactic of those defending a position inherently unjust and, in honest discourse, indefensible.
Here’s the desired result: not a strong Union, but a weaker Union. Not that key sympathy for those in greater straits than our own, but disdain that they don’t just hitch themselves up by their bootstraps. In essence, King is not working to build a stronger Nation, but to tear it down. It’s a set of actions and attitudes which should require his immediate resignation from the House of Representatives, but, being a craven person, he won’t.
Thus, the Iowa GOP faces a real test in 2020: who will they nominate for the position of Representative to Congress for Iowa’s Fourth District? Will the base insist, once again, on Rep King? It’d be a gamble, as he’s doing nothing for the district in Congress right now, and probably won’t in the next Congress, either. Worse, the victory margin trend is narrowing for King, and there’s little reason to believe that the Democrats who made that happen last year will be asleep in 2020; more likely, the independents will side with them over a Republican of sleazy reputation. Hell, he’s even been repudiated by the national GOP.
But, important to the base, his TrumpScore is 92%.
Yes, next year should be quite the test for the Iowa GOP.
1 Except community organizers, who believe their communities have systemic defects which require correction. They’re usually correct.
