The Race Goes Racist

It was inevitable that the 2012 presidential race would turn racial. Why inevitable? Because racism was the winning formula for Obama’s 2008 victory. Since Obama can’t run on his record now that he’s been in office for the past four years, why not recycle what worked four years ago – intimidate and silence critics of his policies by calling them racists?

Race is a sensitive subject in the US and is growing more politically correct by the minute; therefore, be assured that I am writing this blog as sensitively as I can without dodging the race issues which the Democrats and their enablers in the media are trotting out once again.

So let’s start with this question, which I hope you will agree is fair to ask. A candidate runs for president. He has no experience in governing a city or state, running a business – no experience in managing an organization of any type that would qualify him to fill the most powerful leadership position in the world. His legislative experience is limited to a state senate seat, in which his knowledge and interest in his state’s issues evokes only a “present” when votes are called, except he did vote "nay" in opposition to a proposed law banning live-birth abortion. He briefly held a US Senate seat but didn’t engage in any of its responsibilities since he began immediately to conduct a presidential campaign. His opponents have pointed out that he has associated with some very controversial characters in his past, including a domestic terrorist and a pastor/mentor whose sermons are areligious, anti-American, hate speeches. The candidate is white. What are the chances he will win his party’s nomination, not to mention the office of the presidency?

I believe any reasonably thoughtful person would answer “none.”

Yet Barack Obama won his party’s nomination and later persuaded a majority of voters to choose him to lead our nation. His rationale for being the candidate of choice? Hope and change. Oh sure, he talked a lot about what he wanted to change, but there was nothing in his background to suggest that he could implement his program. He had no leadership experience with which to manage the awesome office he was to assume. So, why was he elected to it?

I believe his campaign star-quality hipness helped, but excluding the hard Left Democrats who vote party over candidate regardless, I think all others, if honest, would say their vote for Obama was based in some way on the fact that he was a black man – not because of the two candidates he was the most qualified. For those people, a vote for Obama was historic in a country with a history of racism.

There are two sides to the racism coin. There’s the side that Condoleezza Rice spoke of at the RNC convention in which she said growing up in Jim Crow Birmingham – the most segregated big city in America at the time (and my birthplace) – that her parents couldn’t take her to a restaurant or theater or buy her a hamburger at the Woolworth lunch counter because she was a black girl. That comment, while true, broke my heart.

I have children and grandchildren. Children are without guile. They are morally good because they haven’t lived long enough to be otherwise. I see childhood as a magical time. Yet its daily fun and eager innocence will only last for a short period of a person’s lifespan. And for that reason, I consider it an affront to humanity to ever abuse a child, either physically or by stealing one minute of their magical innocence by denying them anything because of their skin color. Jesus gathered little children around him and said that the nature of heaven was like the nature of children: their innocence, their trust, their freedom from care. Racism is wrong – whether directed toward children or adults – because it can never be justified on a moral basis.

But just as discrimination against someone because of their skin color is wrong, discrimination for someone because of the skin color is just as wrong … and just as racist. That’s the other side of the ugly racism coin. Those who voted in 2008 for Obama primarily because having a black president was history-making were as racist as those who refused to vote for him primarily because he is a black man.

Perhaps some of those who chose Obama over McCain did so based on hope – hope that he would succeed in achieving racial accord where past white presidents had failed. Of all the problems facing this country in 2008, I don’t think many of us would have put racial harmony in the top ten, but it’s a fair issue to evaluate in retrospect. So I ask: is there more or less racial divisiveness today versus four years ago?

It’s just my opinion, of course, but I’d say Obama has done more to cause racial disharmony than any other president in the 224-year history of the Republic. I could cite many examples, but here is a recent one.

Two weeks ago, Obama signed an executive order to establish panels that would lead to a quota system limiting the suspension of black students from schools. Citing data that show black students are suspended more often than white students, the panels’ aim is to ensure that all racial groups receive equal school punishment regardless of individual behavior. In other words, Obama wants whites and blacks punished in equal proportions, despite differences in infractions that lead to suspension. Black kids are eight times more likely to be suspended than Asian kids, and white kids are about twice as likely to be suspended as Asians. Is it racist for a group of kids to be punished more or punished less based on their skin color or ethnicity – which cannot be controlled – rather than behavior which can be controlled?

The Obama administration wears race on its sleeve. That has been reflected among Obama’s protectors in the media and Congress. Any criticism of an Obama policy somehow mutates into racism. Nowhere was that as apparent as it was among the liberal commentariat during last week’s RNC convention in Tampa. Between what I saw and read, virtually every criticism of Obama’s stewardship of the country for the last four years can be made into a subliminal racist remark – so much so that a code word evolved to label it: dog whistle. You know, dogs can hear high frequencies unheard by humans, and in like manner a dog whistle racist remark goes right over the heads of ordinary folks, who accept the words for what they mean – except the commentariat, whose ears are specially attuned to dog whistle racism.

One reporter for the Tampa Bay Times had this to say:

I didn't see many chocolate chips in the cookie they were baking. In other words, as images were projected on massive video screens behind both speakers, I didn't recall seeing many people of color. They probably were there, but in the hour I watched, they didn't seem to come up much.

There’s no argument that the Republican Party has been trying to appeal to minorities to join their agenda. Thus, key speaking slots were given over to Mia Love, the black Republican mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah and US Representative hopeful, Artur Davis, a former Democrat and black American who spoke at Obama’s 2008 nominating convention, and Condoleezza Rice. Moreover, ten Latinos took to the convention stage, which included New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, Texas senatorial hopeful Ted Cruz, and rising star, Marco Rubio. In an effort to close the gender gap, 14 women took part in speaking at the convention – which Debbie Wasserman-Schultz called the “shiny packaging” that the Republicans used to distract women voters from what’s inside the package – “a disaster for women’s future, extreme policies.”

No good deed goes unpunished.

Well, politics ain’t bean-bag and each party will predictably do what it thinks it must to expand its constituency. But instead of airing even parts of the speeches by Mia Love, Artur Davis, and Ted Cruz, MSNBC, which covered the convention, pulled away during their speeches to broadcast a commentary anchored by Rachel Maddow and a panel with Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes and Steve Schmidt, leaving the impression that Rice, former Secretary of State for George Bush was the only minority speaker. Audience pans showed few black faces. Coincidence? Maybe.

But throughout the convention, Chris Matthews, the Hardball spokesman for MSNBC, kept up a steady drumbeat charging Republicans with dog-whistle racist politics. He started off the Hardball convention coverage with an antique video of Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign in which he complained of welfare abuses, citing a “welfare queen” who had collected checks under 127 different names. “Welfare queen” was a dog whistle which “everyone” knew was directed at blacks, according to Matthews. Following that, he showed an on-screen 1976 newspaper clipping in which Reagan had referred to a “strapping young buck who purchased T-bone steaks with foods stamps” as outraged “working people” waited in line to check out at a grocery store. Matthews’ fined-tuned dog whistle detector immediately recognized the 36-year old incident as evidence of inherent Republican racism by calling the man a “buck” – euphemistically black.

Then Matthews dragged an old video of screwball and former KKK member David Duke who ran as a Republican for various Louisiana elective offices. (Wonder if Duke knew fellow KKK member and Democrat Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia?) Duke promised in the video, if elected, he would make welfare recipients work in return for receiving public support, (what a novel idea), get drugs out of their neighborhoods, and work to reduce illegitimate births.

No Hardball critique of the Republican Party would be complete without an appearance of George Wallace, and Matthews flashed a Wallace campaign brochure on the screen which promised to “curtail welfare programs that are designed to pay able-bodied individuals not to work.”

Then Matthews turned to Washington Post reporter, Nia-Malika Henderson, a black woman, and summarized these three dog whistles again, which, according to Matthews, “everybody thought” were racial code words and asked for her comment. Henderson opined that Romney and the Republicans had failed to attract the minority voters – “zero percent of the black voters,” she said. “[Romney] has to do better than John McCain did among white, middle class Americans.” So the only remaining strategy, Matthews concluded, was to scare the white voter into voting Republican.

Salon’s Joan Walsh was also a Hardball convention program guest. Matthews turned to get her comments. “The real problem the Republican Party faces is it is the white party – 89% self-identified Republicans, according to Gallup last year, were white in a country that is 63% white. [The Republicans] also have a problem with white middle class Americans because they don’t trust Romney.”

Matthews accused the Republican Party of dividing the country along racial lines – an interesting “Obamaphile pot calling the Romney kettle black” – and he warned MSNBC viewers to "be on the alert for the tribal messages, the war drums of racial division" which began with the speeches on Tuesday night.

Racism is the "San Andreas fault of this country," according to Matthews.

People who dance on it, exploit it, enjoy it, risk widening that divide, opening it up back to where it was so recently. Nothing is simpler. Nothing is more primitive than to beat the drums of tribal grievance ... welfare cheating, food stamp grabbing are all part of the lingo, along with the old calls for law and order and states’ rights and all the rest ... say what you want, the message is familiar, deeply redolent of the old demagoguery that stirs up the working white people against the black.

Matthews’ obsessed about racism through the end of his convention remotes: "I believe racial division has been this country's great scourge," he said. Racism "can't go away, but can be narrowed," as it was when Obama was elected president in 2008. Huh! Have Matthews and I been on the same planet for the past four years?

There’s so much more I could write about Matthews’ keenly-tuned dog whistle ears, but my purpose in this blog post is to show that allegations of Republican racism in the presidential race are widespread in the media. Writing for the “Huffing and Puffing” Post, Geoffrey Dunn, for example, had this to say about Thursday’s convention program:

Sources have confirmed that “Dirty Harry” himself, Clint Eastwood, is about to sweep into the Sunshine State to serve as the so-called “Mystery Speaker” tonight at the Republican Snooze Fest – better known as the Gathering of Pasty White People – in Tampa.

Is characterizing people as “Pasty White” racist?  Dunn continues:

Eastwood, of course, has a political resume of his own, having served a two-year term as mayor of the upscale and frighteningly white community of Carmel – with a population of 3,800, there were only eight African Americans recorded in the 2010 census – very close in size and demographics to Sarah Palin’s Wasilla, albeit without the meth labs and strip malls.

When a community’s distinguishing quality is “frighteningly white,” is that racist?

The press has called Eastwood’s performance at the RNC “bizarre.” I thought it was a funny impromptu by an 82-year old actor that was reminiscent of Henry Fonda’s performance in On Golden Pond when Fonda was about the same age.

MSNBC’s The Cycle had an on-air group discussion of Romney‘s assertion during a speech in Ohio that President Obama should “take [his] campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.” Co-host Touré Neblett, a black man, saw explicit racial connections in Romney’s use of the words “anger” and “Chicago” which Neblett called the “niggerization” of the campaign. “That really bothered me,” he said. “You notice he said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us.”

The other panel members were momentarily stunned by the use of the “n-word,” and MSNBC, to their credit, required Neblett to make an on-air apology the following day. I saw the apology online. It lasted 12 seconds and not very repentant.

Here’s what Romney said that sent Neblett spinning out of control:

Everywhere I go in America there are monuments that list those who have given their lives for liberty. There's no mention of their race, their party affiliation or what they did for a living. They lived and died under a single flag fighting for a single purpose. They pledged allegiance to the United States of America. So, Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.

CNN canned coverage of the speech after Romney's line about Chicago. Well, I guess the C-word can’t be used either.

Thomas Edsall, in an op-ed for the New York Times alleged that the Republican campaign has “two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.” The two themes? Eliminating the work requirement to receive welfare assistance and reducing Medicare spending by over $700 billion to help pay for ObamaCare.

In other words, it is racist to complain that a legally instituted law – welfare reform – signed by Democrat President Clinton, who falsely took credit for enacting it, is being eviscerated by illegal presidential waivers of the work requirement. And it is racist to warn current and potential recipients of Medicare that the already shaky program is to become a blood donor to ObamaCare. Medicare, according to Edsall, is “a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency” whereas the blood donee, ObamaCare, provides “health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor.” News to me.

Republican campaign references to the explosion of food stamp dependency – 15% of Americans or about 46 million people – has been deemed by the dog whistle monitors as racial. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s convention speech Wednesday night, which joked that Obama “was working to earn a spot on the PGA tour,” immediately jangled the dog whistle that political journalist Lawrence O’Donnell wears around his neck, earning him the Gotcha’ Award for catching the subtlest race slur. The golf joke meant “Obama equals Tiger Woods equals racism,” as O’Donnell saw it. Wow! I sure missed that one.

We’ve got two months to go and quite frankly I’m not looking forward to silly racial connections by the word police who hear “watermelon” when the candidates are talking about entitlements or hear “fried chicken” when they talk about the appalling unemployment rate, especially among minorities.

If I had my way, Romney and Obama would be required to confine every speech to how each of them would provide “a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” That’s why we invented this country 224 years ago.

In a recent attack of boredom from watching coverage of last week’s storms, I looked up the list of names for the 2012 hurricanes, which are assigned alphabetically and, in deference to touchy political correctness, alternately given male and female appellations. We’re up to “I” so far. Let’s see … Isaac slammed west of New Orleans as the convention was in progress, Leslie and Michael have already formed … that means Nadine and Kirk are coming up.

Kirk! Jumpin’ Jehosaphat! Kirk was the name of the famous captain of the Starship Enterprise, whose communications officer was Lieutenant Uhuru, who was black woman.

Obviously, hurricane naming is a dog whistle.

Wonder what Nadine means?