“It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The Summer Of Love,” begins Sen. John McCain’s television ad.
We see a long-haired male, strolling across a campus. Yeah, we get it – the sixties, hippies. The ad then extols McCain’s character: a real American war hero. And the hippies? They’re the foil, the epitome of everything McCain and his party are not – the Democrats.
Considering how widespread is the false belief that hippies ended with the sixties, it seems strange that here in 2008, the first image in one of the Republican nominee’s first ads should be of hippies, but for over four decades, Republicans have successfully exploited hatred of Hippie-Americans.
It’s called hippie baiting – like race baiting. You take a stereotype of a particular group, in this case the counterculture, and pound away at it.
Consider: Two fathers of neoconservatism, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace, openly appealed to hatred of hippies.
Reagan, not at first popular as governor of California, spat, “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, dresses like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”
Wallace, running as an independent, boosted his 1968 Presidential campaign by taunting alleged hippies in his audiences, sometimes challenging them to fistcuffs: “Come up here after I’ve finished my speech, and I’ll autograph yuh sandals for yuh.”
Both men’s pollsters encouraged such behavior: much of the public ate it up.
The badly beaten McGovern campaign of 1972 was so heavily hippie-baited that many have mistakenly seen it as synonymous with the counterculture.
Of course, under the guise of “law and order,” triumphant Republican Richard Nixon ran as a candidate who, among other ugly things, would punish the hippies.
Writer Martin Torgoff notes, “Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan would wield one of his most effective political cudgels in the election of 1980 when he charged that not only were Democrats soft on crime and Communism, but they were the party of pot, too.”
In 1994, midway through the first Clinton Administration, Newt Gingrich returned the GOP to Congressional dominance for the first time in decades, largely by excoriating the “countercultural McGoverniks” in the White House and associating the New Deal with the counterculture, never mind that the 1930’s predate hippiedom by 30-some years.
Reporter Maureen Dowd paraphrases the Republicans: “…before America got what conservatives scoffingly call the welfare state and hippies, things were on the right track” – this, the cutting edge of a “nasty and successful attack mode.”
Defeated 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry? Just before the election, a “news” program Sinclair Broadcasting Group made mandatory on all 40 of its television stations, “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” showed Kerry leading the hippie-dominated Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
A neoconservative columnist writes, “…after watching…some, mostly older folks, ask, ‘Was he really one of those awful hippies?'”
More recently, we heard a Republican outcry against new Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s “San Francisco values” and indignation when Democratic New York senators Clinton and Shumer sought funding for a museum at Woodstock.
Remember the joke about George W. Bush running against Saddam Hussein and winning? Well, the Grand Old Party’s grand old strategy has been running against the counterculture. It’s their secret weapon.
The Democratic Party has been no great friend of Hippie-America, and yes, there actually are Republican hippies, but it’s almost always the Republicans whohippie bait, not the other way around.
Stereotypes of Hippie-Americans parallel those traditionally applied to minorities: lazy, parasitical, dirty, diseased, childlike, inarticulate, irresponsible, drug-addicted, promiscuous, subhuman, un-American, enemies of God, a menace to children, the root cause of society’s problems.
So, hippie-baiting is the politics of prejudice and scapegoating, the low road, and Senator McCain’s tactics are the same old elephant doing the same old trick: appealing to bigotry and fomenting divisiveness.
Paul Dougan of Broomfield is the webmaster of .
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