‘Race Cards’ Succeed All Too Often

Tuesday morning had the feel of an election day. The jurors--not the pollsters nor the pundits--now would return the only verdict that really counted. What interested me was not so much the fate of O.J. Simpson, but whether the “race card” again had worked, as it has in so many elections.

You never really can prove with certainty the effectiveness of a race card. People won’t admit--sometimes even to themselves--that their vote was rooted in racism.

In 1982, many white Democrats said they voted against Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley for governor because he was “soft on crime” or “anti-gun,” not because he was black. But we know from a post-election analysis of polling data that Bradley’s narrow loss was attributable to racial bias. The victor, Atty. Gen. George Deukmejian, did not play a race card, per se, but he never had to because it already subliminally was on the table.

It’s human nature for voters--jurors, anybody--to reach a decision based on a reason they do not want to acknowledge, then to rationalize it on the basis of something more socially acceptable. A legislator will oppose a bill because it “needs more study,” not because voting for it would cut off campaign donations.

We can only speculate about the race card’s true effect on the Simpson jury, which included nine blacks. It was “barely a blip,” one African American juror told The Times. The jury simply did not accept the prosecution’s evidence, he said. “It was garbage in, garbage out.”

We cannot get into the minds of jurors. But we do not need to get into the mind of defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. We heard and read his words to the jury. And its verdict proved that his blatant playing of the race card, at the least, did not hurt Simpson’s case.

“Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck,” attorney Robert L. Shapiro, Cochran’s colleague, told ABC-TV’s Barbara Walters. “[Cochran] believes everything in America relates to race. I don’t.”

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George Wallace, the late segregationist from Alabama, made famous the political battle cry that Cochran, in essence, laid on the Simpson jury: Send ‘em a message! Wallace was referring to civil rights integrationists; Cochran to “rotten apple” cops, like the “genocidal racist” Mark Fuhrman.

“Johnny Cochran was playing to jurors as if they were voters,” says Susan Estrich, a USC law professor and campaign manager for Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. “It outrages me. Criminal juries are not supposed to be sending political messages.”

Race cards are as old as American politics. Estrich’s client fell victim to the most infamous card of modern presidential elections: The odorous Willie Horton TV ad run by George Bush. The ad showed rotating mug shots of Gov. Dukakis and the bearded Horton, a black who had raped a pregnant white woman while on furlough from Dukakis’ prison system.

“Race is still the most powerful divide in American politics,” asserts Estrich.

Race cards usually can stand alone as legitimate issues--illegal immigration and affirmative action, for example. Gov. Pete Wilson argues both are about “fairness.” But Wilson and the GOP know, as well, that both are about attracting white voters. So these issues also are race cards.

On the other side, when immigration activists and minority groups--and Democratic politicians--cannot successfully defend the status quo or offer solutions acceptable to the public, they resort to accusing Wilson of racism. Everybody plays their own race card.

Political consultant Bill Carrick says race cards now are more inflammatory than ever because everyone gets to see them being played over television. Racism, he says, “is like a scab on society. You keep picking the scab and sooner or later you get an infection. And we keep picking at the scab.”

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Nobody should be shocked at race cards being played in the courtroom. The judiciary, after all, is just another branch of our democratic government. These cards are freely shuffled into the decks of the other two branches.

The scab keeps getting picked, but--hey!--whatever works. That’s the morality. Or amorality.

We’ve all heard it: You hire defense attorneys to free their clients and political strategists to elect their candidates--at whatever cost. “All’s fair,” notes veteran consultant Joe Cerrell. “It’s the real world.”

It’s not “how you played the game” (Grantland Rice). It’s “winning’s the only thing” (Vince Lombardi).

And to paraphrase that juror, it’s garbage in, garbage out for society.