Last night we held an impromptu contest to see which reader could identify the nationally-prominent Republican politician who told Southern Partisan magazine …
Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You’ve got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I’ve got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect or else we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda. (See last night’s post for the full post)
Now, the truth is that hundreds of readers wrote in with the correct answer: Attorney General John Ashcroft (“Missouri’s Champion of States’ Rights and Traditional Southern Values” according the headline on the interview’s front page) who sat down with the Southern Partisan in 1998. That was when he was thinking of running for president and eager to burnish his standing with the … well — what shall we call it? — the racial traditionalist crowd?
In any case, it’s hard to announce a winner when there are so many winners and hard to give a prize for the same reason. So probably the best thing to do is just add the entire Ashcroft interview to the TPM Document Collection. You can find the quote above on page three of the interview. And don’t miss what comes right after that quote, where Ashcroft says how real Missourians were part of the Confederacy too and bemoans the fact that the national history standards released in the early 1990s “make no mention of [Robert E.] Lee’s military genius!” Or on page four where the interviewer gushes at Ashcroft after hearing what a staunch defender he is of the states’ rights cause.
Southern Partisan: That’s great. I did not realize that you’d been such a big part of fighting the states’ rights fight.
Senator Ashcroft: Well, frankly, there aren’t any big parts. There are just a lot of soldiers, and I happened to have been one of the soldiers at whom they fired a shot…
Oh golly gee …
