Rev. MEL WHITE
Rev. White said today: “Karl Rove scapegoated gays to win elections, first for Congress and then for president.” White is a former ghostwriter for fellow evangelicals, including Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, and Jerry Falwell. He is president of Soul Force, a group using the nonviolence methods of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to address the suffering of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. His most recent book is “Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right.”
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KEVIN GRAY
Author of the forthcoming Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics and the recent piece “The Black Primary,” Gray said today: “There’s been a continual historical line of the Republican Party appealing to anti-black and anti-gay bigotry to divide people and win the south that Rove has drawn from; from Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond — who left the Democratic Party over segregation — to Lee Atwater (who started out managing Thurmond’s campaigns) to Atwater working in the Reagan and [George H.W.] Bush campaigns and chairing the Republican National Committee.

“This centered on Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ with the Republicans appealing to racist white Southerners to win elections. Much of the leadership of the [George W.] Bush White House came from the Nixon years: Cheney, Rumsfeld — and Rove. Now, some in the Republican Party want to use immigration the way they used integration; but it might be harder to demonize the Latino community than it was to demonize blacks — and the Republican Party is split on immigration.”
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RICK PERLSTEIN
Senior fellow with the Institute for America’s Future, Perlstein just wrote the piece “Rovemort’s Change of Address” for TomPaine.com, which states: “The smart money says Rove is quitting ahead of one or more indictments, and here’s hoping. There is, however, precedent for speculating that he’s not really ‘leaving’ at all.

“The precedent, as is so often in this administration, is Nixonian. In the Nixon Library’s newly released tape of the president’s phone conversations shortly before, on, and after Election Day 1972, the longest is Nixon and Chuck Colson riffing out their second term plans—most especially for a new ‘information and counterattack capacity in the White House’ that would be more durable, and better deniable, than the one that got them in trouble with Watergate.

“The idea was for Charles Colson to leave the White House with great fanfare, as if riding off into the sunset after a job well done. He will establish a law firm that will actually be a political front working for Nixon…”
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For more information, contact the Institute for Public Accuracy at (202) 347-0020.