The Race Card

Supporters of President Obama have one favorite card in the deck

By Dhruv A. Singhal

In both the Joe Wilson fracas and Glenn Beck’s “9-12 Project,” we witness yet again the nation’s two political factions competing for the status of racial victimhood. As usual, Democrats are bemoaning alleged Republican racism, while Republicans are protesting these groundless and cynical allegations.

Most notorious of the accusers is former President Jimmy Carter, who audaciously proclaimed, “People that are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by the belief that he should not be President because he happens to be African-American.”

Predictably, Carter offered no evidence to buttress his claims despite the gravity of their implications, content merely to slander the vast majority of the slim majority of the public that opposes the Obama health care agenda.

Granted, there have been incidents of undeniable racism. Placards blaring, “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African,” and GOP activists declaring escaped zoo gorillas to be “just one of Michelle’s ancestors” are indeed difficult to defend. But liberals, so quick to indict conservative race baiting, too often have extrapolated from these isolated and rare incidents of racism a broader racial dimension to any opposition to the President’s agenda.

Among the most egregious of these liberal claims was that of Maureen Dowd, who, in her September 13 column for the New York Times, claimed that Wilson’s outburst during the joint session of Congress left “an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”

Clearly, such intellectual dishonesty and baseless racial innuendo is indefensible. Defending Dowd’s wildly baseless charge, John McWhorter wrote in the New Republic, “It is just a feeling, of course, but, in my bones, I think Dowd is probably right.”

This jettison of fact and embrace of sentiment would surely make Stephen Colbert proud, but it hardly makes a persuasive argument. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post similarly attempted to argue without evidence in favor of the racism of the anti-Obama forces:

“But I began to suspect that race was a factor for at least some critics when I heard them shouting about ‘the Constitution’ and ‘taking our country back.’ Maybe Obama’s health care plan is an awful idea and his budget is way too big, but how exactly is any of this unconstitutional? Clearly, for some folks, there’s a deeper rage at the man occupying the White House.”

Kurtz is obviously correct in identifying the inanity of some protesters’ invocation of the Constitution, but he provides no logical bridge between this observation and the conclusion of racism.

Writing for the Washington Post on September 18, Eugene Robinson argued, “There’s a particularly nasty edge to the most vitriolic attacks – a rejection not of Obama’s programs but of his legitimacy as President. This denial of legitimacy is more pernicious than the abuse heaped upon George W. Bush by his critics (including me), and I can’t find any explanation for it other than race.” Robinson’s inability to find any explanation only proves the degree to which he is blinded by preconceived notions of the motives of Tea Party protesters, for there are, in fact, an abundance of alternative motives. Genuine opposition to Obama’s agenda comes to mind rather quickly.

Frank Rich of the New York Times, hardly a friend of the Tea Partiers, managed to see motives other than racism when he wrote on September 22, “We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed. Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either.”

In a rare moment of consensus, Jonah Goldberg of National Review agreed with Rich, noting, “They’ve [the Tea Party protesters] said they oppose his agenda for precisely the same reasons they oppose Nancy Pelosi’s and Harry Reid’s and Barney Frank’s agendas. They stand athwart Obama yelling ‘Stop!’ just as they did with Clinton and Democratic presidents before him. Magically, the alchemic powers of Obama’s black skin transmogrify the same arguments and the same rhetoric into racism. Saying ‘you’re wrong’ to a white politician is a disagreement; saying it to a black politician is like shouting through Bull Connor’s megaphone.”

Goldberg brings up an important point when he acknowledges that the same vitriol being directed against Obama was present during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Clinton himself argued this, saying, “I believe, if he were not an African-American, all of the people who were against him on health care would still be against him. They were against me, too. What’s driving the opposition to President Obama on health care is not race.”

Robinson’s decree that anti-Obama fervor surpasses anti-Bush fervor, moreover, is utterly arbitrary and revisionist. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, “You can find pictures where Bush was called all kinds of names, with all sorts of banners being held up and burned in effigy. I’ve seen it in every presidency.”

A lack of civility on the part of the political minority has been a hallmark of American politics since its inception. It takes an extraordinary level of selective amnesia to forget how George W. Bush was once regularly compared to Hitler, how Democrats oft vowed to “take back” America from him, and how Clinton was accused of drug trafficking and the murder of Vince Foster. Furthermore, does anyone honestly believe that the protests against the health care reform initiative of a President Hillary Clinton would have been any more civil?