John McCain stepped up to the plate recently and attacked a
white guy.
Interviewed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, McCain launched into
the relationship between Illinois Senator Barack Obama, the
Democrats’ presidential front-runner, and William Ayers, the
Illinois professor and former member of the radical Weather
Underground. Ayers had come to light as both a supporter of Obama’s
state senate bid as well as serving with Obama on the board of the
Chicago-based Woods Foundation. Ayers, famously unrepentant for his
support for violence, put himself on record in the New York
Times the morning of September 11, 2001, as saying, “I don’t
regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Said McCain to Stephanopoulos in an unprompted remark about
Obama and his relationship with Ayers: “I’m sure he’s [Obama] very
patriotic. But his relationship with Mr. Ayers is open to
question…. if you’re going to associate and have as a friend and
serve on a board and have a guy kick off your campaign that says
he’s unrepentant, that he wished they had bombed more.”
McCain went on, saying this of Obama’s comparison of Ayers to
Oklahoma U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, a baby doctor who has taken a
resolute pro-life position. “The worst thing of all, that I think
really indicates Senator Obama’s attitude, is he had the incredible
statement that he compared Mr. Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist,
with Senator Tom Coburn, Senator Coburn, a physician who goes to
Oklahoma on the weekends and brings babies into life,” McCain said.
“It’s very insulting to a great man, a great doctor, a great
humanitarian…. (H)ow can you countenance someone who was engaged
in bombings which could have or did kill innocent people?” When
Stephanopoulos made the point that Obama has said he doesn’t agree
with Ayers’ views, McCain snapped: “Doesn’t agree with them? Does
he condemn them? Would he condemn someone who says that they’re
unrepentant and wished that they had bombed more?”
All well and good.
Then, out of the blue, comes the news that the North Carolina
Republican Party is airing a television commercial criticizing two
state Democrats, Obama supporters both as well as candidates
running for the North Carolina governorship. The commercial
features the famously left-wing rants, much televised all over the
nation by every news outlet imaginable, of another Obama booster.
Like Ayers, this Obama supporter was spewing any manner of
left-wing nonsense, all of it drawing immediate fire from critics.
The criticism of this Obama supporter became so intense that Obama
himself was forced to address the issue with a major speech in
Philadelphia in the middle of the Pennsylvania primary. Obama
backed away from his supporter and, in the course of the next
several days, put as much distance as he felt safe in doing between
them.
SO WHY DID John McCain suddenly feel compelled to demand the North
Carolina GOP withdraw its ad featuring the raw language of this
Obama supporter? The reason, apparently, was race. The ad did not
feature Ayers — although it surely could have done so. Ayers
remarks, however, were not captured in the gold coin of today’s
politics — video. So it was controversial Obama supporter number
two — the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s minister and friend of
twenty years — who was featured in the commercial. And as it
happens, this purveyor of left-wing cant is, unlike Ayers, a black
man.
With a swiftness that troubles, John McCain went paternalistic.
In language that was made worse by its apparent earnest sincerity,
McCain telegraphed that at some level he has bought into the
liberal idea of victimology, specifically in this instance as
applied to blacks. Listen to the words of John McWhorter on the
subject of victimology. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,
a respected academic and author of a number of books on race,
McWhorter, it needs to be said in this context, is, yes, an
African-American. He makes his point here in his 2000 book
Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America:
Victimology channels (black) Separatism to create a
sentiment that black people are still so mired in oppression that
to express any real criticism of them is to kick them while they’re
down, like castigating a person bleeding on the ground for using
foul language when he cries out in pain.
So McCain, confronted with the extremist rhetoric of Ayers, waded
into the controversy in an instant, with the unerring eye of a
fighter pilot targeting a munition dump in North Vietnam. Yet when
he learns the North Carolina Republican Party has just joined a
virtual chorus of critics zeroing in on the Reverend Wright,
astonishingly for a presidential candidate in 2008 America, McCain
suddenly takes on the persona of the white-shoe country club guy
who generously tips the black waiter after assuring the waiter he
really thinks “you people” have a point about voting rights. More
astonishing still he couches this with indignant language about the
Republican Party being the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore
Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
What about the idea that the North Carolina GOP simply took
Reverend Wright at his word? Or words? That in fact, the language
Wright speaks is not the language of black America at all but
rather the same language of the white bomber Bill Ayers — the
language of the American extreme left? And that as such, Reverend
Wright — and Professor Ayers and Senator Obama and Hillary Clinton
and Ted Kennedy and Bill Moyers and MoveOn.Org and the editorial
board of the New York Times and all the rest — deserve
nothing less than to be challenged not on their race or religion
but on their ideas?
To his credit, on Sunday McCain took Wright on directly. “I saw
yesterday some additional comments that have been revealed by
Pastor Wright, one of them comparing the United States Marine Corps
with Roman Legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our
savior. I mean being involved in that, it’s beyond belief. And then
of course saying that al-Qaida and the American flag were the same
flags,” McCain said.
YET WHAT SEEMED ALMOST reflexive in taking on the North Carolina
GOP for doing the same thing is a McCain puzzle. What particularly
disturbs about McCain’s North Carolina remarks is what this might
portend for a McCain Administration approach to racial issues in
general. It’s great that McCain has gone out of his way in recent
weeks to make stops in Selma, Alabama, and the Ninth Ward in New
Orleans. Bravo! But is he willing to step up to the plate and ask
the tough questions about how racial politics has been used by
liberals to keep the black residents not only of the Ninth Ward in
New Orleans but other American cities like Detroit or Washington,
D.C. in such perpetually horrific difficulty? These and other
cities are places in America where political control has been held
with an iron-fisted certainty for decades — by liberals. Liberals
and the ideas they worship have run the school system, the housing
projects, the health care system. They have been completely in
charge as urban unemployment rates in black communities not only
soared but persisted.
If the Obama campaign has demonstrated anything, it is that it
is Obama’s own party — the Democrats — who have such a virulent
history of playing racial politics. Black voters all across the
country have watched in astonishment as the Clinton campaign has,
with a casual ease that leaves some mouths agape in wonder,
repeatedly played the race card, most notably in South Carolina.
For the first time in decades there are black Americans who may be
open to the idea of voting in numbers for the party of Condoleezza
Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas. Voters who may finally
realize the perils of identity politics and prefer a political home
where the battles are over ideas, not your skin color. Voters who
can suddenly see that my former boss Jack Kemp has been right all
these years when he has endlessly preached about the importance to
the black community of everything from reductions in the capital
gains tax to enterprise zones to the income tax rate to home
ownership.
What opportunity there is with voters in the key state of
Michigan who may well now pay attention to McCain if he starts
treating the black residents of Detroit as a seriously badly-served
community not because their elected leaders are black but rather
because their elected leaders have been relying on bad ideas, ideas
that haven’t worked in mostly black Detroit or mostly white Moscow.
As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has pointed out
consistently:
The Detroit public school system currently graduates 22
percent of its entering freshmen on time and fails to serve 78
percent of the young people in Detroit. And if you’re an
African-American male, you have a 73 percent [chance of]
unemployment in your 20s if you drop out of school and a 60 percent
chance of going to jail. Now, faced with a catastrophic collapse of
that scale, we should basically fundamentally replace the Detroit
school system with a series of experiments to see if they’ll
work.
What an opportunity for McCain to point out that none of this has
to do with the color of someone’s skin but rather with the quality
of their ideas.
In this framework, the insistence by McCain that the North
Carolina Republican Party pull their ad linking the ideas of Obama
and Reverend Wright to North Carolina Obama supporters troubles. A
lot.
Decades ago, President John F. Kennedy, a century late in terms
of the leadership of the Democrats on racial issues but still with
a steady moral vision, looked at Americans through the television
lens and said flatly that “race has no place” in American life. JFK
was right.
This is a unique opportunity for John McCain to take his place
alongside a Lincoln, a Theodore Roosevelt, a Ronald Reagan, and
move this country once more toward the idea that America should be
a colorblind nation. A nation where everyone is judged not just by
the content of their character, as Dr. Martin Luther King urged,
but also, in politics, by the content of their ideas.
THE REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT has quite voluntarily put his ideas
out on the front line of American thought. He has every right in
the world to be taken seriously, as does his fellow left-winger
Professor Ayers. Their opponents would be fools if they did not
take the ideas of each man seriously, as Senator McCain did when
seriously addressing the issue of Obama and his relationship with
Ayers and as he did Sunday by finally targeting Wright. The North
Carolina Republican Party has treated Wright — and Obama and his
North Carolina supporters — respectfully by challenging them on
their ideas. Not their race. America — and North Carolina — is
one very long way from the days when North Carolina’s most
prominent racist was segregationist Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s
Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, the same man who was also
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt’s boss.
Straight talk? John McCain must do better than this.
Readers will remember that McCain was an unhesitatingly severe
critic of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, another white
guy. Fair enough. But he should realize that based on his attacks
on the North Carolina Republicans he is raising a subtle — and
needless — question:
Would McCain have been so unrelentingly tough on Rumsfeld — if
Rumsfeld had been black?
