PARTISAN By CHRISTOPHER M. SULLIVAN served as editor-in-chie yecars h zine, is by profession a campaign candidates like Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond and many others. ‘This year, Mr: Quinn was a consultant to John McCain's presidential effort. quotes you the full story. Just when you think that anti- Southern bigotry has cooled to white ashes, suddenly a tongue of flame aps out and you've got a four-alarm fire. That's what happened during the campaign between George W. Bush and John McCain. ‘To be sure, everyone was up tight MeCain had won big in New Hampshire, and for about ten days it appeared as ifthe fat cats of the GOP had thrown $60 million down the largest rathole in history. If MoCain won South Carolina, then the nomina- tion was up for grabs. Small wonder lers were ready to rate measures, ategy they finally devised involved a combination of larceny and high risk. The larceny was an outright theft of Me age Suddenly, Mr. Bush emerged from the wreckage of his campaign in New Hampshire as “The Reformer With Results” And his new theme was cou- pled with a nationwide but regional- ized attack against MeCain. In the South, with telephone push-polls and mail, he attacked MeCain as too liber- |, pro-abortion and not a real Republican. ‘Outside the South, the attack was different. In New York, the Bushwhackers bought television ads OUTHEARN magazine) were faxed to various ne damage McCain by association with Quinn. Several media outlets took the bait. We devote this page and most of Obiter Dicta to bring PARTIS VIEW sqular readers may be care that Richard Quinn, who for ‘and as a columnist for this maga- consultant who has helped elect After Senator McCain's surprising win in New Hampshire, an unprecedented, no-holds-barred $60 million campaign was launched to discredit McCain in every possible way. As a small part of that geur- gantuan effort, suddenly and mysteriously old Southern Partisan taken out of context (and some that never even appeared in the rs organizations in an effort to suggesting that McCain was for breast cancer and against the environment. And they fed national reporters the idea that McCain had hired a Southern extremist, Richard Quinn, as a ke campaign consultant. After all, Quinn had been the editorin-chief of the ‘Southern Partisan magazine for years; ‘and the Southern Partisan was full of ideas considered subversive and polit- ically incorrect. Wasn't that enough to make South-haters everywhere just a ttle suspicious of MeCai Inn age that worships the logi fallacy, hanging the Southern Partisan around MeCain's neck passed for rea soned debate Less that two wocks later, the Republican nomination went to Bush for reasons other than the attacks on Quinn and the Partisan. However, it’s instructive to see how the modern lib- tral mind operates: its fierce commit- ment to illogic and oversimplification, its disregard of fact, its perennial love affair with stereotype Here are just a few of the charges the media brought against Quinn and the Partisan, as well as the passages cited to support them. The first blast. came from Benjamin Soskis, writing in the New Republic Soskis called me one afternoon AN 2 47TH The Never Ending Struggle a P ae een Or: Se Ercan) Is This Image Racist? Ifyou read the New York Times you might think so. An article by David Firestone, which appeared January 12, 2000, had this to say: A recent issue, fof Southern Partisan... shows a man read- ing an Uncle Remus book to his grandchildren, [andl contains a Tist of the 15. Best Southern books of all time... none is by a black writer ‘As you can see from the cover image above, the title of the book the gentleman is reading is not visi- ble. Firestone nevertheless decided to imply to his readers that Uncle Remus was a central element on the ay, we did list a num- ber of books written by black writ- ers as among the best of all time, a fact Firestone failed to note. He pre- ferred stressing that not one of the top 15 books were writen by blacks, ‘which we suppose suggests his view that the authorship of the Bible (our number one book) can be racially identified. He also negelected to ‘mention that one of our top 15—St Augustine-—was an African, © ouaAnRTER nasa + 7