"Police geared up like military SpecOps jailing reporters are a bit more exciting and dystopic box-office summer hit than a dreary look at the poverty, politics and policy fails ... Why isn’t anybody taking this issue and running with it?"

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The Politics of #Ferguson
Why neither party wants to talk about race.
By Charles D. Ellison, August 14, 2014

The political fault lines cracking all around Ferguson, Missouri are as deep as the obvious racial ones cracking heads and sidewalks in the St. Louis suburb. As protests over the killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown turned to rage, blocked intersections and then blew up into that eerily black riot scene in Hunger Games, few really stopped to consider the very raw political calculus feeding into it. What you end up with is something not as them and us, cut and dry, “black and white” as we’re all quick to assume.

Predictably, the mainstream knee-jerk of a media narrative is always apt to miss the nuance and context. Police geared up like military SpecOps jailing reporters are a bit more exciting and dystopic box-office summer hit than a dreary look at the poverty, politics and policy fails that fuel the exploding gas tank. Why do we act surprised? Mix a disproportionately black 22 percent Ferguson poverty rate with a 12 percent St. Louis County poverty rate, then throw dashes of troubled residents, hopped-up cops and inept politicians with no vision in a pot and, voila, you end up with social unrest. Students of history see this script played out repeatedly since the dawn of civilization. Most lawmakers, always caught up in the reactive moment, clearly don’t read stuff like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail and so we end up making the same irritating mistakes all over again, even when the root causes and pressure points are staring us in the face.

That’s what makes it so complicated and too-hot-to-handle for pols – on both sides of the partisan aisle. Democrats seem like natural allies for aggrieved protesters and Republicans obvious groupies for confused and nervous popo. An assortment of ideologues, progressives, conservatives, emerging libertarians and other party machine stowaways are nagging at the fringes. But only gingerly: Before Wednesday night, when police arrested two Washington-based journalists and political Twitter exploded in outrage, only three members of Congress had issued press releases on the mess on Ferguson. Then the statements came rolling in. Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted “This is America, not a war zone. The people of #Ferguson just want answers. We all want answers”; Sen. Rand Paul, who is making an interesting bid for the hearts and minds black voters, wrote: “Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention.”

Now President Obama, Eric Holder and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon have weighed in, too—all calling on both sides to calm down. But there’s not much outraged residents, protesters or the few punks crashing up Quik Trips can do at the moment. The city is 65 percent black, yet disenfranchised by a white mayor and a six-member city council that’s all-white except for one African American. The police force is 95 percent white.

It took Nixon, a Democrat, several long days of watching tear gas and rubber bullets fly in Ferguson before deciding maybe wasn’t such a good idea to go around chomping on jumbo corndogs at the State Fair instead of showing his concern. Black-area politicians like St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley and Rep. William Lacy Clay, also both Democrats, have been relatively calibrated in their responses.

Why isn’t anybody taking this issue and running with it? Maybe Warren and Paul will say more, but police brutality and racism are lousy wedge issues for an off-year congressional midterm election. Especially for Democrats. The unfolding crisis makes the political stakes very high in Missouri and nationwide. In an already dicey midterm season for Democrats, the last thing Dems want is a racially charged national debate driving a greater share of white Republican-leaning voters to the polls. Even though a majority of Americans see police brutality as a growing problem—64 percent overall, according to a recent YouGov poll—a lower percentage of whites (63 percent) do, compared with the overwhelming majority of blacks (75 percent).
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Could police brutality become an election-year issue? By itself … probably not. But it depends on how out of hand it gets in the Show Me State or how in-your-face whites perceive African Americans to be on the issue. Ferguson could give some sneaky Republicans a useful dog whistle to motivate anxious white voters in tight Senate races, and possibly the next presidential one, too. On the other hand, if it helped Rand Paul in his mission to make the Republican Party safe for black votes once again, wouldn't that be something?
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