You know, of course I agree with Bob Herbert. The racism that simmered within the Hillary Clinton campaign burst into full bloom last fall at the Palin rallies. I wasn’t so much surprised to encounter this kind of vociferous racism as I was to see how much permission people were giving each other to voice it. Meanwhile, the press seems content to have agnostic debates about whether any of this is racism at all.
And people need to take personal responsibility to make sure that others know that they don’t have permission to voice racist sentiments around them. But, I also think it’s getting kind of tired to keep begging Republicans to do something about this. Maybe one or two Republicans (Olympia Snowe, come on down) will get fed up and flee the party, but the leadership and the rank-and-file know that their base hates black people. Their base hates black people and they hate the idea of any black person receiving one dime of government assistance for anything. That’s just a fundamental truth about the American political system.
Rather than focus on getting the Republicans to denounce their own base, a better use of energy is to lobby the media to label racism as racism. There is plenty to report. We see Republican activists and minor party leaders doing rancidly racist things almost everyday. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are putting Father Coughlin to shame lately. Getting the media to drop their faux impartiality would be a start.
But the media and most of the Democratic strategists think that all claims of racism backfire and help the racists. Ask the Clinton campaign if they think that is true. As bad as our racism problem is, the only place where it is accepted as normative is within the shrinking Republican Party. We have plenty of racists in the Democratic Party, but they certainly don’t think it is polite or wins more votes than it loses.
The other thing I’d like to see the media do is to stop asking Barack Obama what he thinks about the misbehavior of every black person in this country. They didn’t think it was appropriate to ask Clinton or Bush what they thought everytime a white person said something stupid or committed some crime. They shouldn’t treat the president as if he is the spokesperson and personal attorney for every black person. That’s a double standard that we could all do without.
