DAN HAAR: Hayes’ uncomfortable link between race and the 2020 vote.
With raw emotions, a punch to the gut and her place in the world under wrongful attack, Rep. Jahana Hayes posted a tweet ver y late Monday night, tr ying to make sense of what had just happened on a Zoom campaign event.
“So sorr y to Newtown who had to endure this zoom bombing episode,” Hayes, D-5, wrote — after a group of racists had repeatedly used the Nword and other horrific epithets relating to slaver y, to disr upt her online gathering.
I jo in the chor us of people on both sides of the political aisle decr ying the attack. Now let’s focus on the link between it and the Election Day vote — a complex and uncomfortable connection that Hayes herself raised.
The racists had shown support for President Donald Tr ump on the Zoom call, rather loudly. That Hayes felt the need to apologize for her audience having to witness an attack on her speaks loudly as well.
Hayes ended her tweet with the following: “This behavior is being normalized! We can ALL choose not to accept it. Please vote on Nov 3rd.”
That last line — “Please vote on Nov. 3” — raises questions that cut to the heart of this national election, and beyond that, the race-based culture war that divides the United States in 2020. Why did she connect the fight to de-normalize racism with voting?
Did Hayes mean, “Vote for me as a Democrat to help send a message that we are the party of inclusion?” Did she mean, “Vote for me as an African American to send a message about racial tolerance?”
Maybe she meant “Vote against Donald Tr ump.” After all, there can be no doubt that Tr ump has welcomed the support of racists by f ailing to rebuke them unconditionally and by sending such dog-whistle signals as “stand back and stand by” to white supremacists and “sh**hole countries” referring to places where dark-skinned people live.
Come to think of it, I can hear those whistles pretty well as a human.
Or, did Hayes simply send a message to her supporters exactly three weeks from Election Day with the same call that any campaigner would deliver: Vote.
I didn’t hear back from Hayes through her Congressional office or her campaign. But in the climate we’re living through right now, we could excuse her for connecting the vote in 2020 to a statement on racism in America — even if she were not under extreme duress.
Trouble is, Republicans in general and specifically, Hayes’ GOP challenger, David X. Sullivan, are no more racists than Democrats. Racism is a ubiquitous trait based on centuries of histor y, not a political leaning.
Sullivan issued a sharply worded statement condemning the Monday night Zoom bombing attack by a “bigoted coward,” adding, “I am grateful and encouraged that the management of Zoom is investigating this disgusting incident.”
J.R. Romano, the Republican state chairman, said to me, “there’s no one in the Republican Party who believes this is acceptable behavior.”
And yet, here we are after another racial attack, with a viable connection between ending the normalization of such vile behavior and voting. How can something that’s not partisan have a partisan solution?
I spoke with two people who think a lot more than most of us about this unfortunate aspect of the culture wars: Erick Russell, vice chairman of the state Democratic Central Committee, and Khalilah Brown-Dean, a political science professor and senior director for inclusive excellenceat Quinnipiac University.
“This is partisan in a way because of the tone that has been set and the racist and bigoted statements by the current occupant of the White House,”
Russell said “People who have held these thoughs have been emboldened over the last five years to spew that hatred...this has become a partisan issue because Tr ump has politicized these kinds of things. He’s built his base on this rhetoric.”
Careful here — Russell is not saying racism is partisan, “but what she experienced and her response to it is partisan.”
And her experience is nearly universal for African Americans, especially in the public eye. Russell, who is Black, attested to that.
I told Brown-Dean I thought the victims here are decent, morally upstanding Republicans such as Sullivan who must campaign from within a party whose leader has made racial division, if not racism itself, a hallmark.
No, she said, they could rebuke Tr ump clearly and cleanly. But could they?
It’s not about Hayes vs. Sullivan, and yet that’s the cho ice voters in the 5th District are given, and it’s impossible not to think about race at a time like t his.
“I don’t think there’s any question about who she’s r unning against, I think the question is about what she’s f acing in this current climate,” BrownDean said. “No one, I think, would disagree that this is an incredibly tense climate in this countr y righ now.”
She added, ‘ This becomes bigger than this one Zoom bombing.”
It’s about criminal justice, for sure, and that led Brown-Dean to say, speaking both metaphorically and literally, “There are a few bad cops who spo il it for all the good cops.”
Brown-Dean suggested Hayes may have meant any of the possible reasons, or a combination, for imploring people to vote in her message about the incident. And so we have a toxic myster y, how race and this election tie together when that should not, in an ideal world, be happening.
That’s the power of Tr umpism, and Tr ump, to divide. It’s no wonder that Hayes’ 1,3 30-word blog post Tuesday morning showed the closesy thing to a breakdown we’ll ever see from a stable politician on solid ground.
“I am tired, completely and utterly tired. No, actually I’m exhausted. This is something that a leader is not supposed to say; but it’s whatever. ... I am not OK.”