What Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said about President Barack Obama is not remotely wrong, or racist.
Reid commended Obama to the authors of the forthcoming book Game Change as a highly electable, “light-skinned” African American, “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
Indelicate language, but certainly not racist.
Now let’s hear Republicans say as much—and then demand that their candidates be given the same intellectually honesty treatment when they fall short on racial etiquette. Even more magnanimous and impressive: demand Reid resign for his health-care putsch, not for his inartful remarks about Obama.
Here is my version of the Reid Remarks:
The election of Obama is no racial milestone; it’s not that whites have come to their senses. But rather that African Americans have finally done what’s right (to paraphrase the childish, churlish prose of one Rev. Lowery). For the first time in a long time, the black community has put forward a candidate of caliber; a candidate the American people were only too willing to consider for the highest office in the land.
Until Barack, the black community had disgorged the likes of Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton. Be he black, brown, yellow or red (Rev. Lowery’s classification)—no sane American would elect those two phonies to serve on their local PTA board, much less in the Oval Office.
Update I (Jan. 12): Reid displays “soft condescension,” says the reader below. Fine. But I don’t understand the, “Where is Reid coming from,” and the, “Why did he feel the need to articulate this truth.” Or “Why would it surprise him that a black man speaks non-ebonics (‘white’)?”
If the statement Reid made about obama’s uniqueness among the black community’s political leaders is true—why should it not be articulated? Obama’s diction and demeanor are indeed uncommon among black leaders, academics, etc. Is there something wrong about saying so?
Harry was expressing an objective reality. He forgot, for a moment, to be the two-faced player he usually is. How ironic that the one time the man (Reid) speaks the truth, he is crucified for it.
Update II (Jan. 12): LOTT’S LOT.
Republicans seeking Sen. Harry Reid’s resignation as majority leader over racial remarks he made about Barack Obama say yes — that Reid should be held to the same standard as former GOP Sen. Trent Lott, whose own racial gaffes cost him the Senate leadership in 2002
From “Lancing the Lott”:
“Only seasoned and cynical opportunists could suggest that it was for segregation that Lott was pining, when he praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 party platform at the octogenarian’s 100th birthday bash.”
“In 1948, Americans didn’t want the government to be involved in general, Frank Newport of the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing told an unreceptive Jerry Nachman of MSNBC. When asked, the majority polled insisted, for instance, that issues revolving around employer ‘discrimination’ be left to employers and the states. The same goes for the adjudication of lynching. Nothing in the poll suggests an approval of the crime. Rather, Americans were emphatic about keeping the federal government out of state affairs.”
“When Strom Thurmond went up against Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, it was about states’ rights. Dixiecrats was the derogatory name the Media Ministry gave to what was really the States Rights Democratic Party. Considering that the Constitution consigns law enforcement to state and local governments, the position the Dixiecrats took was hardly subversive.”