Nashville Post Politics: Me? Racist?

Nashville Post Politics

Me? Racist?

Roger Abramson notes what may become the new defense against accusations of racism:

In the future, “Hey, I voted for Barack Obama!” will be every white person’s get-out-of-racism-free card. It’s perfect: 1) a real racist (at least, an anti-black racist) would presumably not vote for a black man for president and 2) it’s completely unverifiable! Perfect! It’s like saying you were part of the French Resistance in 1943.

AmericaBlog: McCain wants credit for not being a racist

AmericaBlog

McCain wants credit for not being a racist 

Ta Nehisi Coates: Racism, socialism, Ashley the Todd, Joe Plumber blahblahblah

Ta Nehisi Coates

Racism, socialism, Ashley the Todd, Joe Plumber blahblahblah

Thanks to everyone who sent me clips of McCain folks acting a fool at rallies and evidence of McCain campaign race-baiting. I know I haven’t talking much about Ashley Tood, and Sammy Davis and welfare lately. I was outraged for awhile and now I’m just kinda “meh” about the whole thing. Part of it is because I think Obama is going to win. But the other part is that something about it just feels petty. There are white racists among the American electorate, and the lionshare of them are supporting McCain. OK, now what?

Anyway,  there’s been a pretty lively debate raging between Yglesias, Douthat, Judis and Feeny. It’ll probably come as no surprise that I mostly agree with Douthat, if with a significant twist. It’s not that I put it past McCain’s people to race-bait, it’s that I really don’t care.  I basically think it’s to our disadvantage to ascribe mystical powers to words like “welfare” and “socialism.” True, I’ve done my share of indicting. But, I really believe that the first step in garnering the votes of any group of people, is to see them human beings with all the complexities and myriad emotions weighing on them that actual people have.

Nashville Post Politics: The Race Race

Nashville Post Politics

The Race Race

Ross Douthat shows how Barack Obama deftly helped create a climate where traditionally effect Republican tactic were not deployed and would not have worked had they been tried:

Now there are various reasons why none of these issues have played a role in the campaign: Attacking on some of these fronts would have required flip-flops on McCain’s part; attacking on others (crime, especially) would have reaped vastly diminished returns compared to GOP campaigns of yore; etc. But it’s also the case that the Obama campaign (and its surrogates and allies) have done a masterful job of boxing the GOP in on race-related fronts, playing off the media’s biases, McCain’s sense of honor, and the Republican Party’s unpleasant history to create a climate of hair-trigger sensitivity around terrains and topic that usually hurt Democratic candidates. I’m not asking anyone to shed any tears for the McCain camp on this front: African-Americans have been on the losing end of hardball politics in this country since the first slave ship docked in Virginia, and there’s more than a little rough justice in the fact that Barack Obama’s campaign has found ways to turn his race to its advantage during this campaign.

Count Us Out: ACORN Time To Play The Race Card (AGAIN)

Count Us Out

ACORN Time To Play The Race Card (AGAIN)

The Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now is launching a major ad campaign to accuse the GOP of vote suppression because of the concerns they’ve raised over ACORN’s rampant voter registration fraud.A new ACORN television ad that will go up nationally on Wednesday shows an image of a young black man while a narrator says “John McCain and the Republicans are trying to keep him an untold others from voting. Tell John McCain not this time.”

 

ACORN is also blaming Fox News for potentially depriving Americans of the right to vote. “And then there’s Fox News, accusing ACORN of all kinds of criminal activities hundreds-HUNDREDS-of times during the past few days,” said a recent email from ACORN asking for support from their members.

The Republican National Committee has denounced ACORN’s charges.  “ACORN’s most recent charges of voter suppression seem to be yet another attempt by this questionable organization to waste valuable taxpayer money and cloud their own record of voter registration fraud,” said the RNC’s Chief Counsel Sean Cairncross. “ Just as a losing Kerry campaign election manual in 2004 urged activists to lodge a ‘pre-emptive strike’ claiming voter intimidation regardless of validity, ACORN is taking a page straight from the Democrats’ playbook.  The only voter suppression taking place is that which prevented the false registration of ‘voters’ like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the Dallas Cowboys starting lineup from poisoning the American electoral system with fraudulent ballots.”

FayObserver: HUNGRY TO PLAY RACE CARD

FayObserver

HUNGRY TO PLAY RACE CARD

Perhaps seeing no contradiction with her tut-tut over the robo-calls, Palin said McCain should use Rev. Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor, against him. Politically, she is right.  Morally, he is.

But Palin knows that playing the race card is a tried-and-true election wedge and would have done more in one week than all the fake controversies, like ACORN, like Ayers, like “socialist,” have been able to do for a whole campaign. It still probably would have failed in this unique year. But with the bad economy, the in-the-toilet Republican brand, the debates that Americans thought Obama won handily,  it has became clear that Wright was always McCain’s best shot.

Other McCain supporters from the Palin school are up this week with a Wright ad, going without McCain’s public support. They used Obama’s two young daughters. Classy!

A New York Times magazine article on the flailing McCain campaign speculated that McCain’s concern for his own daughter might be one reason he does not want to play the race card.  His adopted daughter, now 17, not too long ago found out that she was the alleged illegitimate baby of McCain and a black prostitute, according to circulars with false information spread by Bush minions in 2000.

McCain employs those very same minions, some of whom had beenencouraging him to use Wright. But McCain does not want to be branded a racist, as he surely would have been, doubtlessly by the writer of this blog among many, many others. Playing the race card, from Willie Horton to Jesse Helm’s “hands ad,” is after all, racist and would be properly classed as such.

Palin on the other hand wouldn’t have cared. This church-going woman has just the kind of situational morality that fits modern politics.

OpenLeft: Egg Industry Shill Plays The Race & Class Cards On Prop. 2

OpenLeft

Egg Industry Shill Plays The Race & Class Cards On Prop. 2

The industrial egg industry has truly lost its collective head over the prospect of Californians passing Proposition 2, the legislation that would give farm animals the luxury of stretching their limbs.

Julie Buckner, the Californians for Safe Food spokesperson who went on Oprah to claim thatProposition 2 would destroy California’s egg industry, is trying a really tacky new tack,according to today’s New York Times.

Buckner told the Times that Winfrey’s implied support for the measure “only codified her sense that the ballot measure is being pushed by “wealthy, narrow-minded elitists” who do not understand its real-world consequences.”She went on to dis the Humane Society, who’s sponsoring Proposition 2, for being funded, apparently, by diamond-encrusted dog-loving dilettantes:

 

“This is an organization raising money from upper-middle-class white women writing $100 checks,” she said.”

National Review Online: Racy Content

National Review Online

Racy Content

Transcend means “to move beyond, to surpass.” At least that’s what I always thought. But I’m beginning to wonder whether it means instead: “Much, much more of the same, only this time really stupid.”

Exhibit A: the incessant, relentless, click-your-ruby-red-slippers-and-say-it-until-it-comes-true mantra that Barack Obama will magically cause America to “transcend race.” One hears and reads this everywhere, but less as an argument than as a prayer, an expression of faith, a “from my lips to The One’s ear” sort of thing.

It is, of course, total and complete nonsense. According to L.B.O. (Logic Before Obama), transcending race would involve making race less of an issue. Passengers on Spaceship Obama would see race shrink and then vanish in the rearview mirror.

Instead, Obama has set off a case of full-blown race dementia among precisely the crowd that swears Obama is leading us out of the racial wilderness. Rather than shrink, the tumor of racial paranoia is metastasizing, pressing down on the medulla oblongata or whatever part of the brain that, when poked, causes one to hallucinate, conjure false memories and write astoundingly insipid things. For instance, a writer for Slate sees racism when anyone notes that Barack Obama is — wait for it — skinny. What this portends for Fat Albert is above my pay grade.

We need to rewrite those old Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, because now virtually any adjective, noun, verb, or adverb aimed at Barack Obama that is not obsequiously sycophantic or wantonly worshipful runs the risk of being decried as racist. Community organizer? Racist! Mentioning his middle name? Racist! Arrogant? Racist! Palling around with a (white) terrorist? Racist! Celebrity? Racist! Cosmopolitan? Racist! This? Racist! That? Racist! The other thing? Oh man, that’s really racist.

The new Schoolhouse Rock cartoon: “Conjunction: a word that connects a racist attack and Barack Obama.”

Greensboro NC News-Record: Doug Clark: Race becomes an issue in High Point ward election

Greensboro NC News-Record: Doug Clark

Race becomes an issue in High Point ward election

There’s an undercurrent in High Point’s Ward 2 City Council race: Beat the white guy.

He’s Pride Grimm Jr., one of five candidates running for a seat from the east-central district. The other four are black, as is a fifth who filed but quit his campaign.

Ward 2 was drawn explicitly for the purpose of electing a black representative, and it always has. Ron Wilkins, the longtime councilman for Ward 2, is retiring this year

…

Let’s do the math: With six names on the Ward 2 ballot, someone theoretically can receive as little as 17 percent of the vote and win.

Consider again the voter registration numbers for Ward 2, by race: 65 percent black, 30 percent white, 5 percent other or no response.

Suppose voters follow race: Grimm gets 30 percent. Maybe the other candidates divide the black vote. In that scenario, Grimm wins. For the next two years, the white minority candidate represents one of High Point’s two black-majority wards.

…

Grimm says they’re “trying to play the race card,” adding: “If that’s all they have to stand on … I think the people of Ward 2 are definitely smart enough to see past that.”

Grimm says race doesn’t come up when he campaigns door-to-door whether the residents are white or black. He’s visited black churches and been greeted with “nothing but openness and acceptance.” He lives in a mixed-race neighborhood where people get along fine.

“I don’t see a bunch of racism in Ward 2 except from the people I’m running against,” Grimm told me, excluding Jerry Mingo.

I hope he’s overstating the situation, although racial politics can turn ugly.

I understand the background. Before the ward system, black candidates seldom stood a chance of winning a High Point City Council seat. Most other offices were out of reach, too. Forty years ago, or even less, black voting was suppressed.

But times are changing for the better, as the likely election of Barack Obama as president will show.

High Point has changed, too. It’s been nine years since Al Campbell, who is black, won an at-large City Council seat with well over 60 percent of the vote. He lost the 2003 mayor’s race to Becky Smothers, but Becky Smothers beats everyone.

CAFFEINATED POLITICS: John McCain Plays Race Card In Pennsylvania

CAFFEINATED POLITICS

John McCain Plays Race Card In Pennsylvania

The headline in the Washington Times, a conservative paper, told all there was to know. 

“McCain targets white Clinton strongholds“

The story is pretty much what one might expect.  But is this what John McCain wants as his legacy about his final political contest in America?  I have read for decades about ‘Potomac Fever’, and how it grabs the soul of some politicians, but I never understood how thoroughly it can impact a person until this election year.  The polls show there is no way that McCain can win in Pennsylvania, so why go there and stir passions of fear and hate?  Just to show the nation there is still a fight in the McCain campaign is not good enough.  Lets remember that after Election Day we still have a nation that needs to come together and fight the real issues that confront the new President.  Enough of the racial politics.