The left is having a field day saying that Newt Gingrich’s South
Carolina debate answer (blasting a question by Juan Williams, who
actually is a prince of a guy) about Barack Obama being a “food
stamp president” was somehow a “dog whistle” to racists, and that
his success in South Carolina was partly due to his tacit racial
appeals to the SC voters’ supposedly latent racist sentiments.
We’ve heard it all week; heck, Ed Schultz has been saying it since
last May. Last
night on Schultz’s show, Chris Matthews was at it again:
[O]ne thing that bothered me personally as an American, and you
talked about it, I believe, and so is Al Sharpton, this idea of
talking about food stamps, which we all know is code. And to use
that the night he won here, Saturday night, coming in to the
panhandle of Florida, playing with the Southern people for the
Southern tradition, white people, trying to play them like a banjo,
I think that`s what he`s up to.
Schultz himself continued to push this line relentlessly, and
encouraged Martin Bashir to say this:
We traced back an editorial from the “New York Times” in 1994
where they accused him of using coded language in exactly the same
way. He`s doing exactly the same thing. It`s almost 20 years. He`s
the expert at this. He barely conceals a nasty, virulent racism,
and then he points it repeatedly at both the president and also at
those who are picking up Food Stamps who need them.
And so on it went, at sickening length.
Well….
When people who have worked with Newt Gingrich describe his
“Jekyll
and Hyde personality” (a comment I’ve seen numerous times),
they may actually be underplaying the truth. Gingrich doesn’t just
have two personas; he has probably a half dozen or more. (He is
vast! He contains multitudes!) For every Mr. Hyde there is also a
Mr. Sieke; for every Dr. Jekyll there is also a Dr. Heckle. Trying
to figure out which Newt was which was so impossible that it drove
his colleagues to distraction while he was Speaker, which is one
reason things fell apart so badly.
Nevertheless,in all of those Newtonian
personalities, never have I seen even the slimmest hint either of
racism or of tacit approval of the racism of others. Indeed, just
the opposite: For all of his other flaws, Gingrich,
from my observations, has been one of the Republican leaders most
open to and insistent on outreach to minorities. I can’t cite a
specfic example from memory, but during his Speakership the overall
tenor was clear: Gingrich detested racism. The “good Newt” is a
compassionate man and a man dedicated toward equality before the
law. The good Newt also was the one who has never gotten his due
credit for insisting that the GOP make it a priority to improve the
city of Washington DC — to end the municipal corruption, to
improve its governance, to prove that a majority-black city doesn’t
need to be a city that people give up on. In fact, to the extent
that the urban renaissance of DC was due to federal policy (which
was indeed a significant extent, although of course the locals had
much to do with it, obviously), that renaissance was driven by two
men: Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Speaker Newt
Gingrich.
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I remember Gingrich once
saying — it might have been as recently as last year, or it could
have been years ago — that one main reason he was a “Rockefeller
Republican” in the 1960s was because he thought the Northeastern
Republicans of the time were more “progressive” (in the good sense
of the term) on racial issues. Well, while evidence shows that was
far from the only reason he was with Rocky (Gingrich was, at the
time, a liberal Republican on many issues), it absolutely rings
true when he cites his concern for civil rights as one of the
issues that motivated him.
Yesterday, I cited at great length an
absolutely scathing column that Mickey Edwards, former
congressman and former chairman of the American Conservative Union,
wrote about — meaning against — Gingrich last month. Yet even in
that column, Edwards noted, as a compliment, that one reason he
came to know Gingrich particularly well was that he, Edwards,
included Gingrich in a group dedicated to reaching out to
minorities:
During his first term, I established a small gathering of
members I considered to be intelligent, thoughtful, and committed
to an optimistic and big-tent conservatism. Newt was one of the
members I invited to participate, along with friends like Jack
Kemp, Bob Livingston, and Ed Bethune, each of whom had reached
beyond the stereotypical conservative constituency and had worked
assiduously to reach out to minorities and people with new
approaches to problem-solving (Kemp was probably the
archetype).
Some character traits don’t change. I happen to think that
trait, the one that detested racism, is one of Gingrich’s
constants.
Real racism is awful, and it should be denounced at every
opportunity. There are plenty of conservatives who do so, and
rightly so.
But fair is fair. It is utterly unfair to equate references to
Food Stamps to a racist dog whistle, and it is unfair to put
Gingrich in the camp of those who deliberately play on racial
stereotypes.
There are plenty of other reasons to worry about nominating
Gingrich for president. But as for racism, that dog won’t hunt.
