I recently attended Netroots Nation, the annual gathering of
America’s liberal bloggers, to see how they were reacting to the
first 200 days of the Obama administration and Democratic dominance
of Congress.
As I wandered the hallways of the cavernous Pittsburgh
Convention Center, I expected to find liberals happy that their
political dream of complete control of the federal government had
been realized. But I was wrong. Over and over again, I heard
complaints that President Obama was retreating on their key issues,
and where he was pursuing a liberal agenda it was being blocked by
“reactionary throwbacks to a darker time in America.” “Howling
mobs” were showing up at town-hall meetings and attacking the
president’s health care plan. “They may cloak their rhetoric using
anti-government and anti-tax rhetoric but racial concerns are at
the heart of their objection to Obama,” said James Rucker, the
executive director of Color of Change.
No matter how opposition to ObamaCare is framed, liberals will
find a racial subtext. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell
decried those who complained that government-run health care would
result in fewer Americans “taking responsibility” for their own
well-being. “What we know over the past 25 years,” she said, “is
that language of personal responsibility is often a code language
used against poor and minority communities.”
Oh, so much has changed since “hope” triumphed last November! As
the columnist Jonah Goldberg notes, “It was Obama’s supporters who
hinted, teased, promised, and prophesied that Obama would help
America ‘transcend race.’… [But since then] Obama’s supporters
have tirelessly cultivated the idea that anything inconvenient for
the first black president just might be terribly, terribly
racist.”
It’s certainly true that rude and obnoxious people showed up at
the town-hall meetings. But the worst examples of bad behavior had
little to do with conservatives. The only person I know about who
was beaten at a town-hall meeting was a black conservative who was
put in the hospital by union thugs. The pictures of Obama sporting
a Hitlerian mustache were the work of Lyndon LaRouche, a conspiracy
theorist whose roots are in the 1970s Paranoid Left. Similarly, the
poster depicting Obama as the Joker from Batman (the
LA Weekly denounced it, saying “[t]he only thing missing
is a noose”) was the Photoshop work of a Palestinian-American
supporter of left-wing UFO enthusiast Dennis Kucinich who didn’t
vote for Obama.
But all of that is a set of “inconvenient facts” to liberals
looking for an explanation of why ObamaCare is sinking. Actress
Janeane Garofalo had this cogent summary of why so many people were
turning up at town-hall meetings: “This is about hating a black man
in the White House. This is racism straight up.”
Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift was more sophisticated, telling
NPR that opposition to ObamaCare was an expression of the “racism”
that was “latent” during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Even E. J. Dionne, a normally sober Washington Post
columnist, played the race card. He noted after some people were
spotted bearing legal firearms outside town-hall meetings that
“guns were used on election days in the Deep South during and after
Reconstruction to intimidate black voters and take control of state
governments.” The point apparently was that the Long Night of Jim
Crow was about to descend on the country again.
Liberal hysteria about guns being carried near town halls knew
no bounds. Inconveniently, the most widely reported example of
someone carrying an assault weapon to a rally involved a black man.
That didn’t stop MSNBC from hyping the story. It carefully cropped
the man’s head and arms from the image it ran so as to obscure his
race.
When my Journal colleague Steve Moore tried to offer a
counter-explanation on MSNBC’s Hardball, it didn’t fly
with host Chris Matthews. “This is still a pretty conservative
country and people are upset about the policies in Washington and
they don’t think the politicians are listening,” Moore told
Matthews, who in that way of his immediately countered: “I think
some of the people are upset because we have a black
president.”
Liberals are looking for racists behind every corner in the same
manner they used to accuse supporters of Joe McCarthy of hunting
for Communists under every bed. In an ABC News story about how
racist white militias might somehow be linked to the town-hall
protests, Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center warned that
Obama has “triggered fears among fairly large numbers of white
people in this country that they are somehow losing their
country.”
To its credit, the Obama Administration has avoided falling into
the trap of accusing its critics of racial motives. Since Obama’s
July stumble in which he sided with a black Harvard professor
friend in his dispute with a white policeman (Obama said the
policeman was “acting stupidly”) the White House has steered clear
of race.
In November, New York Governor David Paterson, the state’s first
black governor, blamed his own low poll numbers on the
“white-controlled media.” He went on to warn that “[t]he next
victim on the list —and you see it coming — is President Barack
Obama.”
The White House swiftly sent a message to Governor Paterson
knocking down his suggestion and sharply criticizing his remarks.
But it chose not to make the criticism public. The administration
doesn’t want to play the race card, but neither does it want to
explicitly repudiate those who do.
Shortly after Paterson made his ill-chosen remarks, President
Obama got another expression
of sympathy he must not have welcomed. Retired Cuban dictator Fidel
Castro wrote a newspaper article saying he had positive feelings
about the changes Obama was trying to bring to America, even as the
U.S. president was being thwarted by evil right-wingers. “The
extreme right hates him for being African-American,” Castro wrote.
“I don’t have the slightest doubt that the racist right will do
everything possible to wear him down, blocking his program to get
him out of the game one way or another, at the least political
cost.”
So far as we know, the Obama administration didn’t communicate
any displeasure to Castro over those remarks. As for Fidel, no word
yet on how his negotiations with MSNBC are going. Presumably his
new show would air in between Chris Matthews and Keith
Olbermann.
