The Harry Reid scandal is entirely the creation of journalism. Reid will survive, but the press has a lot to answer for.
by Michael Kinsley
Atlantic
The Decline of the Racist Insult
When Republican party chairman Michael Steele demanded the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid over some unfortunate remarks Reid made about Barack Obama, he neglected to even pretend to be offended. Reid told the authors of Game Change, a book about the 2008 political campaign, that Obama was “light-skinned” and “had no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Steele is the Republican chairman and a good example of the maxim that there is no such thing as an un-famous black conservative. You’ve heard of every single one of them. This is partly because the Republican party and the conservative media put every black conservative on display like a trophy (“Y’see? We’ve got some too.”), and partly because the media of all political slants and none at all have a need for symmetry. African Americans may have voted overwhelmingly for President Obama and other Democrats, but if you’re a Sunday talk show producer putting together a panel, and you’ve got a black liberal, you need a black conservative for balance.
As many have pointed out, Reid’s comment was a “gaffe”—a statement that gets you in trouble because it’s true. The sense that Obama was a different kind of black politician—not part of the southern civil rights movement or the great migration north—may have made some African Americans suspicious (though I would like to meet a single black American who voted against him for this reason), but undoubtedly helped him among whites.
But even the black chairman of the Republican party could not bring himself to claim that he was offended by Reid’s remarks. Or maybe it didn’t even occur to him that he needed to claim offense in order for his call for Reid’s head to make any sense. Steele demanded Reid’s resignation on the grounds that Democrats had demanded the resignation of Republican Trent Lott back in 2002, when Lott celebrated the 150th birthday of Senator Strom Thurmond by saying that America would have been a lot better off if the South had won the Civil War. (Actually, Lott said that if America had voted for the southern segregationist Dixiecrats back in 1948, when Thurmond was their standard bearer, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems for all these years.” And it was only Thurmond’s 100th birthday.)
(More here.)
Atlantic
The Decline of the Racist Insult
When Republican party chairman Michael Steele demanded the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid over some unfortunate remarks Reid made about Barack Obama, he neglected to even pretend to be offended. Reid told the authors of Game Change, a book about the 2008 political campaign, that Obama was “light-skinned” and “had no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Steele is the Republican chairman and a good example of the maxim that there is no such thing as an un-famous black conservative. You’ve heard of every single one of them. This is partly because the Republican party and the conservative media put every black conservative on display like a trophy (“Y’see? We’ve got some too.”), and partly because the media of all political slants and none at all have a need for symmetry. African Americans may have voted overwhelmingly for President Obama and other Democrats, but if you’re a Sunday talk show producer putting together a panel, and you’ve got a black liberal, you need a black conservative for balance.
As many have pointed out, Reid’s comment was a “gaffe”—a statement that gets you in trouble because it’s true. The sense that Obama was a different kind of black politician—not part of the southern civil rights movement or the great migration north—may have made some African Americans suspicious (though I would like to meet a single black American who voted against him for this reason), but undoubtedly helped him among whites.
But even the black chairman of the Republican party could not bring himself to claim that he was offended by Reid’s remarks. Or maybe it didn’t even occur to him that he needed to claim offense in order for his call for Reid’s head to make any sense. Steele demanded Reid’s resignation on the grounds that Democrats had demanded the resignation of Republican Trent Lott back in 2002, when Lott celebrated the 150th birthday of Senator Strom Thurmond by saying that America would have been a lot better off if the South had won the Civil War. (Actually, Lott said that if America had voted for the southern segregationist Dixiecrats back in 1948, when Thurmond was their standard bearer, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems for all these years.” And it was only Thurmond’s 100th birthday.)
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home