[Vision2020] Who's Playing the Race Card?

[No Weatherman]

October 17, 2008
Who's Playing the Race Card?
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in
a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John
McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association — with total
strangers, mind you — but worse: guilty according to The New York
Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

But should you bring up Barack Obama's real associations — 20 years
with Jeremiah Wright, working on two foundations and distributing
money with William Ayers, citing the raving Michael Pfleger as one who
helps him keep his moral compass (Chicago Sun-Times, April 2004) and
the long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud
specialist ACORN — you have crossed the line into illegitimate guilt
by association. Moreover, it is tinged with racism.

The fact that, when John McCain actually heard one of those nasty
things said about Obama, he incurred the boos of his own crowd by
insisting that Obama is "a decent person that you do not have to be
scared (of) as president" makes no difference. It surely did not stop
John Lewis from comparing McCain to George Wallace.

The search for McCain's racial offenses is untiring and often
unhinged. Remember McCain's Berlin/celebrity ad that showed a shot of
Paris Hilton? An appalling attempt to exploit white hostility at the
idea of black men "becoming sexually involved with white women,"
fulminated New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. He took to TV to
denounce McCain's exhumation of that most vile prejudice, pointing out
McCain's gratuitous insertion in the ad of "two phallic symbols," the
Washington Monument and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Except that Herbert was entirely delusional. There was no Washington
Monument. There was no Leaning Tower. Just photographs seen in every
newspaper in the world of Barack Obama's Berlin rally in the setting
he himself had chosen, Berlin's Victory Column.

Herbert is not the only fevered one. On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow
of MSNBC and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek fell over themselves agreeing
that the "political salience" of the Republican attack on ACORN is,
yes, its unstated appeal to racial prejudice.

This about an organization that is being accused of voter registration
fraud in about a dozen states. In Nevada, the investigating secretary
of state is a Democrat. Is he playing the race card too?

What makes the charges against McCain especially revolting is that he
has been scrupulous in eschewing the race card. He has gone far beyond
what is right and necessary, refusing even to make an issue of Obama's
deep, self-declared connection with the race-baiting Jeremiah Wright.

In the name of racial rectitude, McCain has denied himself the use of
that perfectly legitimate issue. It is simply Orwellian for him to be
now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism. What makes it doubly
Orwellian is that these charges are being made on behalf of the one
presidential candidate who has repeatedly, and indeed quite
brilliantly, deployed the race card.

How brilliantly? The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is
because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a
racist. Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his
post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause
of African-Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison
called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist,
then anyone can.

And Obama has shown no hesitation in doing so to McCain. Just weeks
ago, in Springfield, Mo., and elsewhere, he warned darkly that George
Bush and John McCain were going to try to frighten you by saying that,
among other scary things, Obama has "a funny name" and "doesn't look
like all those other presidents on those dollar bills."

McCain has never said that, nor anything like that. When asked at the
time to produce one instance of McCain deploying race, the Obama
campaign could not. Yet here was Obama firing a pre-emptive charge of
racism against a man who had not indulged in it. An extraordinary
rhetorical feat, and a dishonorable one.

What makes this all the more dismaying is that it comes from Barack
Obama, who has consistently presented himself as a healer, a man of a
new generation above and beyond race, the man who would turn the page
on the guilt-tripping grievance politics of Jesse Jackson and Al
Sharpton.

I once believed him.

CORRECTION — Last week I wrote that in 1995 Bill Ayers gave Barack
Obama a fundraiser in his home. I should instead have called it a
campaign event.
letters at charleskrauthammer.com
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/finding_racism_where_it_doesnt.html