Conservatives must ratchet up their criticism of Democrats’ racially divisive emotional rhetoric, and simultaneously champion policies that benefit Americans regardless of race, Rep. Mo Brooks told The Daily Caller.
“I would look at the example of Martin Luther King,” Brooks said. “It was his dream that we would get past race, and the way to get past race … is to quit dividing us based on race.”
“The Democrats are moving in the exact opposite direction from what Martin Luther King fought and died for,” he said. “The Democrats want to take us back the days of racial strife and disharmony, and perhaps even violence.”
“What Republicans need to do is appeal to Americans, not play the race game like the Democrats do,” said the Alabama Republican. “We need to treat everyone equally. The message needs to be about all Americans and one America.”
Brooks has been the target of furious criticism and scorn from progressives since he stole their rhetoric on Aug. 4, when he declared that Democrats wage a “war on whites” as they try to spin up election enthusiasm among their diverse and depressed supporters.
Radio host Laura Ingraham mildly rebuked Brooks when he rolled out that incendiary phrase on her radio show. Democrats “are playing the race card, they’re playing the war on women card … but I don’t think ‘war on whites’ is the best phraseology,” she said.
Brooks has nailed his thesis to the Internet, and he isn’t taking it down.
“The Democrats for years have used the ‘war on …’ [phrase] and I thought it was good to turn the phrase back on them,” he told TheDC.
There’s no shortage of examples.
Nine weeks before the 2012 election, for example, Vice President Joe Biden told a black audience in southern Virginia that Republicans “are going to put y’all back in chains.”
“Stop being mad all the time. Stop just hatin’ all the time,” President Barack Obama told a supported audience July 30 in a Kansas City, Mo., speech.
The Democrats aren’t waging a violent “war on whites,” but the sharp term is “hyperbole that is required to make the media sit and take notice about how the Democrats are teaching their candidates to inject race into their campaigns,” he said.
Obama is “the great divider,” he said. “Democrats are making things worse by dividing America,” he said.
The GOP should offer unifying messages, especially in the hot-button immigration issue, he said.
“It doesn’t make any difference what skin color you are. Every demographic suffers when wages are suppressed, jobs are lost, and income inequality is created by a huge influx of illegal alien labor that distorts the labor market,” he said.
“There are only so many immigrants we can take, that our economy can absorb, without damage to our struggling American families,” he said.
A pro-American immigration pitch can be backed up by positive emotions, such as love of country and fellow citizens, not by a pro-GOP version of the Democrats’ emotional hatred, he said.
“There is love of country, and to the extent that you are able to express love of country, and when what you doing makes am a better place, there is an emotional patriotism associated with that,” he said.
But the GOP shouldn’t spare the Democrats from deserved and emotional criticism, he said.
“The president and democrats don’t care about the damage done to American families, they see this illegal alien problem as nothing more than a long-term Democratic party registration drive,” he said.
“That is their motivation for the bad policies they promulgate,” he said.
