Politics has gotten very ugly. Arguments that used to be limited to fringe groups and the dark corners of the internet are now embraced by presidential candidates.
So what are things like behind closed doors? Even worse.
A column in the Financial Times published Tuesday gave us a peek. Mary Childs, a financial correspondent for FT, reported on what she observed at a private hedge fund conference in May.
The conference featured a debate between Donna Brazile, former campaign manager for Al Gore’s unsuccessful presidential run and prominent member of the Democratic Party, and Karl Rove, a Republican strategist and commentator best known as the chief political adviser to George W. Bush.
At a certain point the discussion Rove offered this “joke” to Brazile, who is black:
I did you a great favor bringing you into politics in the 1860 campaign and this is how you repay me? We’re happy you got the right to vote but it wasn’t your current party that was responsible for it.
Childs didn’t find this funny, calling Rove’s quip “patronizing and insensitive.”
She noted that the hedge fund conference felt like a “safe space” for a white man to tell a highly successful African-American woman that she owed her success to him. Not one of the industry speakers at the conference were black and less than 15 percent were women.
At the event, Brazile noted that Rove was also factually incorrect. As a woman, Brazile did not receive the right to vote until 1920 and as a black woman did not have her right to vote protected until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In an interview with ThinkProgress, Brazile went further, saying Rove’s perspective was emblematic of a problem infecting the entire Republican Party.
“I don’t find it strange when Karl Rove brings up Abraham Lincoln because they can’t bring up anything else,” Brazile said. “It’s easier for them speak of Lincoln’s accomplishments than what they are doing today on voting rights.”
“They don’t have a future reference. They have the past,” Brazile said.
Brazile noted that, even among a group of conservative hedge fund managers, her perspective on the issue got “bigger applause.”
She challenged Rove and other Republicans claiming the mantle of racial justice to support restoration of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court gutted in 2013. Though reauthorization of the iconic legislation passed unanimously in 2006, Republicans in Congress have refused to hold a vote on new legislation. In the meantime, voting rights have suffered across the country.
My response was reminding him of the history of voting rights in this country. We must #RestoreTheVRA. https://t.co/bIObvSpdOg
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) June 6, 2016
This wasn’t Brazile’s first run-in with Rove. She appears with him a few times a year on the paid lecture circuit.