One of the regulars on Bill O'Reilly's show is Dr. Marc Lamont
Hill, who will be joining Columbia University's faculty this
fall.
An amiable liberal, Dr. Hill is always earnest and occasionally
provocative with his take on things racial. While his
sparring with O'Reilly is frequently interesting, and Hill is
doubtless a smart guy, when he makes as many factual errors in
one night as he did last night discussing a Specter health care
reform town meeting in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, he should be called
out.
Dr. Hill apparently attended Specter's meeting (I was
outside talking to the crowd, Hill was inside). In discussing
this with O'Reilly he made three factual errors, using his
mistakes to attribute racism to the crowd. This is wrong.
Mistake # 1: Apparently there were "birthers" in the Specter
crowd, those who have this thing about questioning Obama's
legitimacy to be president based on his supposed birth not in
Hawaii but outside the U.S. Dr. Hill than laid this at the feet
of racism, saying that such an allegation only pops up against
the nation's lone black president.
This is not true. Chester Alan Arthur, the nation's 21st
president, was born (so it was insisted) in Vermont. In fact his
father owned a farm some fifteen miles over the border in Canada.
When Arthur ran as James Garfield's running-mate in 1880, a New
York lawyer named Arthur Hinman was hired by Democrats to
investigate. Hinman claimed Arthur came to America from Ireland
when he was fourteen, and hence was not eligible to be on a
presidential ticket. When this proved to be a political
non-starter, the allegation was changed to say he was born in
Canada. As with Obama, the allegations were dismissed after
investigation by reporters of the day. Still, they were made
repeatedly. Hinman would go on to publish a book
entitled, How A British Subject Became President of the
United States.
So Obama is in fact not the first president to face this
treatment, and Arthur was your basic portly white guy Republican.
The allegations Hill says he heard in Lebanon were not unique and
not racial.
Mistake #2: Hill attributed the age of the protesters -- in their
70s and 80s -- and the fact that "30 or 40 years ago" they were
voting Republican as a sign of racism. This is stunningly bad
history.
Lebanon is a solidly Republican area. It is that because Central
Pennsylvania was a huge source of support for Abraham Lincoln,
the Republican Party of which he is viewed in these parts as the
founding father -- and which was decidedly pro-civil rights.
Indeed, during the 1960s, the two prominent Republicans in
Pennsylvania -- U.S. Senator Hugh Scott and Governor William
Scranton -- were huge liberal Republican supporters of civil
rights and both very popular in Central Pennsylvania. To impute
racism to people who would have been among their strongest
supporters and who voted Republican because they self-identified
with Lincoln is egregiously bad Pennsylvania history. Dr. Hill
should know better.
Mistake # 3: Dr. Hill was upset because people in the Specter
meeting referred to President Obama as "that guy" or "that man."
Surely Hill should know that Franklin Roosevelt's critics
famously referred to him derisively as "that man in the White
House."
If Obama supporters want to tout the President as another FDR, it
is silly to attribute precisely the same kind of criticism FDR
received, right down to the derogatory nickname, as something
racial. It is, in its own uniquely American fashion, extremely
presidential.
Here's hoping Dr. Hill cracks the books a bit more before he says
things like this on O'Reilly.
