They wheeled George Wallace in backward and then lifted him onto a seat behind his bulletproof lectern. Confetti, thrown by little girls in straw hats, caught in his swept-back hair. Wallace waved to the crowd.
We were in South Boston in February 1976, and Wallace was running for president. Five hundred people were packed into a small hall, and 300 more waited outside.
Wallace had been shot and paralyzed in Laurel, Md., during the 1972 presidential primary. Many people remember that. But not many remember that he also won the Maryland primary that year, just like he won Michigan, Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina.
Now he was in Southie, where a few nights before, police and anti-busing protesters had clashed, with many injuries. Wallace was not cowed.
“You! The working men and women will be the kings and queens instead of the ultra-liberal left that has been getting everything all the time!” he roared.
After his speech, Wallace took some questions.
“My strategy?” Wallace said. “I put down the hay where the goats can get it.”
The name of George Wallace, who died in 1998, was invoked recently by Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who likened the rhetoric of Wallace to the rhetoric of John McCain and Sarah Palin.
“George Wallace never threw a bomb,” Lewis said. “He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Ala. As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all.”
A stunned McCain called on Barack Obama to “repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments.”
Obama obliged. In part. Bill Burton, spokesman for Obama, said: “Sen. Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace. . . But John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee . . . ‘pals around with terrorists.’ ”
McCain wants to get out of this campaign without being accused of racism. And that was the point of Lewis’ statement. Lewis was issuing a warning to McCain: Don’t lay down the hay where the goats can get it.
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