Uncovering the Race Card--Reluctantly

Joe Wilson's blurtout last week lit a fuse to set off a slow-motion exposure of race in the national anti-Obama rage.

Today the House Black Caucus takes the lead in censuring the South Carolina Congressman with what are clearly mixed feelings about dealing publicly with an issue that seemed to have been settled by the inauguration of a "post-racial" president only a few months ago.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn has refused to call the "You lie" outburst racist, skirting the issue by telling reporters only that Obama is the first president to be treated that way, but other members of the Caucus are less circumspect.

"We've got to realize," says Georgia Rep. David Scott, "racism is playing a role here. I'm hopeful that this will be a wake-up call for us to get it off the table."

Such ambivalence reflects ancient fears of feeding prejudice by calling public attention to it, a dilemma long discussed privately by Jews over anti-Semitism.

During the election campaign, Barack Obama avoided race until the furor over Rev. Jeremiah Wright forced him to make his cathartic speech on the subject, and last week he tried to dismiss the Wilson uproar by quickly accepting his "apology."

Yet, in the savagery of some of the opposition to the President's policies, the elephant in the room is roaring too loudly to ignore.

On the PBS News Hour last night, conservative columnist Ross Douthat acknowledged that "clearly Barack Obama's race plays some role in the kind of--you know, the kind of anxieties and so forth that are roiling the political right."

African-American moderator Gwen Ifill had asked black Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson about the violent opposition to health care reform, "Is there something about this presidency which brings that out?" and she had replied, "I don't know if it's this presidency; I hate to think that it is."

So do we all, but it won't go away by not talking about it. Time to revive the bromide about sunlight as the best disinfectant.

Empathy Police, Keystone Kops

Charges of racism against Sonia Sotomayor are being reduced to exceeding the speed limit for empathy as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions instructs former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia on the finer points of demographic discrimination.

In the scramble to discredit the President's Supreme Court nominee, what remains of the Republican Party is being decimated even more by open conflict between elected officials and "mouths" such as Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

After the former Speaker walked back his twittering about racism, Sessions voiced approval of the retraction to focus on the issue of empathy:

“I firmly believe that many judges on the Supreme Court feel too empowered to impose their personal views while they interpret statutes or constitutions and that’s where we ought to focus the debate. Will she be restrained? Will she simply follow the law and be a neutral umpire or will she be a judge that’s not committed to faithful interpretation of the law, will not subordinate herself to the law?"

This line of attack, a view of robotic judges hewing to the letter of the law and ignoring its impact on human beings, comes with ill grace from those with a heritage of using it to maintain a "separate but equal" society in the South for almost a century--an America where today's president would not have been allowed to vote and where the mixed marriage of his parents was criminal under a "faithful interpretation of the law."

In trying to make "empathy" a dirty word, Republicans may want to look at Dick Cheney, the Radical Right's hero, who is diverging from the party line on gay marriage, presumably because he has some of that undesirable feeling for his own daughter.

If GOP Senators want to vote against Judge Sotomayor's confirmation, they will have to come up with a better rationalization than that.

If Obama Loses

Forget all the rhetoric about four more years of Bush, Old Politics vs. New Politics and all that jazz. Absent any plausible reason for a late McCain surge and victory, the inescapable fact about an Obama loss would be an ugly truth to haunt American life for years to come.

Around the edges of all the opinion poll data about what will happen in just over 48 hours is an uneasiness that points to heavy turnout, early voting, the question of whether youth registration will convert into actual balloting, etc. as imponderables in this unusual election year that shows Obama outpolling McCain on almost every issue of voter trust.

But the GOP elephant in the room is race: How many "undecideds" are rummaging around the coded attacks on Barack Obama as a wealth-spreading, terrorist-friendly Muslim radical to justify their bone-deep need to vote against a black man as president?

If enough of them do, how can we explain it to ourselves--and the rest of the world?

No last-minute scare tactics about taxes or lame McCain cameos on SNL will suffice to explain away what, given all the truths of this campaign, would be a lasting American shame.

Undecided as Code

Somewhere in the higher-than-usual percentage of undecided voters in the late stages of an almost two-year campaign are those who can't or won't vote for an African-American candidate.

The good news for Barack Obama is that, as his lead in the national polls grows toward double digits, it may, as gamblers say, "cover the spread."

Michelle Obama recently dismissed the Bradley Effect by pointing to the primary vote that gave her husband the nomination, but that overlooks the late surge by Hillary Clinton among white voters in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Rep. John Murtha, in his usual blunt way, recently pointed out that race matters.

A critical question about such voters may be, How deep does their "indecision" go? Is it virulent enough to make them choose McCain or just skip voting entirely? Since many of them are among those most worried about the sinking economy, the answer may be a test of self-interest against deeply held prejudice.

In any case, on Election Night, we will learn something about how far America has come on the subject of race since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Michelle Obama Channels Betty Ford

But in the era of gender and racial correctness, not quite...

On "The View" today, according to the Times' Jodi Kantor, "She got to explain her 'proud' comment at length, in a friendly setting; she talked about her husband and children in approachable terms; she stressed her humble roots (she just said her mother has a slight gambling habit, and has won $17,000 with what sound like quarter slots). That said, it looks like Mrs. Obama is having the appearance of fun, rather than actual fun. This is not the loosest I’ve seen her, and she is surely watching every word."

No wonder. "Unlike her husband, who wrote in his memoir that he had learned at a young age to smile and charm and disarm whites of the notion that he might be a bristly black militant," Maureen Dowd observes, "Michelle has not always hidden her jangly opinions so well."

Over three decades ago, Americans fell in love with an outspoken First Lady, who didn't hesitate to talk about birth control, her addiction to alcohol or anything else she was asked. But Betty Ford came to the White House without running an election campaign gauntlet--behaving naturally unlike others who could pass for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands.

Michelle Obama has a lot of that outspokenness in her, but in this election year, a rare combination of racism and sexism will be waiting to twist everything she says. It will take a delicate balance to channel her inner Betty Ford while preventing haters from picturing her, in Dowd's words, as "a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman."

It might help to keep in mind that Mrs. Ford deflected criticism by keeping her sense of humor. Telling a reporter that the media was asking all kinds of personal questions, except how often she slept with her husband, she volunteered to answer that, too.

"As often as I can," Betty Ford said.

Will Glib Be Good Enough?

Sooner rather than later (see below), Barack Obama has had to confront his twin albatrosses, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the decidedly secular Tony Rezko. In his rounds of the cable news shows last night, Obama was articulate, as always, but for the first time, glib bordering on shifty.

On Countdown with a deferential Keith Olbermann, he distanced himself from Wright's racist rants but asked voters to believe that, in 17 years of churchgoing, he did not hear any of the venom or he would have condemned it.

Even more tenuous was Obama's attempt to paint Wright as a spiritual leader caught up in the anger of his generation at racial injustice, a pissed-off Martin Luther King, if you will. That won't wash with those who remember how King stressed rejection of such attitudes at a time when Black Power advocates were promoting them. Senator, Wright is no Martin Luther King. Not even close.

In his attempt to "disgorge" Rezko, along with his campaign contributions, Obama stressed that he has not been accused of any wrongdoing or connected to any of the issues involved in the current federal corruption trial, but his opponents won't be deterred from harping on their long, close association, including the buying of the Obamas' Chicago home.

Obama's most fervent admirers will be tempted to pass off these iffy relationships as part of a misguided search for substitute fathers by a man who lost his own at an early age, and there may be truth in that. But Obama is now attempting to become the national father figure, and just asking him to show better judgment than George W. Bush would be setting the bar very low.

Bill Clinton, An Embarrassment

As if race and gender were not complications enough in this critical Presidential contest, we now have Bill Clinton stepping up to remind us of how devious and disruptive he can be.

For a year, he stayed dutifully in the background, but the man who can't help being Bill Clinton is now roiling his wife's campaign with the kind of hatchet work on her opponent that is normally done by an incumbent or aspiring Vice-President. In the process of Cheneying Barack Obama, he is outdoing Jimmy Carter in trashing the dignity expected of a former President.

It's dispiriting to see a former occupant of the Oval Office seeking absolution from Al Sharpton for parsing Obama's positions on the war in Iraq as a "fairy tale," the kind of attack usually assigned to a campaign chairman or anonymous aide like the one quoted as saying, "If you have a social need, you're with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you're young and you have no social needs, then he's cool."

It's saddening to see the re-emergence of the man who used to be called Slick Willie in sliming Hillary's opponent while complaining about the "sanitizing" of Obama by the media.

Dignity has never been Bill Clinton's long suit and, under the pressure of Obama's surge, his panic is understandable. But it's a sad reminder to those who supported him of what comes with all that undeniable idealism and political savvy--a reckless need to get what he wants by seducing the world.

He dodged his own impeachment but, if he doesn't step back from the spotlight now, our problematic former President is going to wreck Hillary Clinton's chances for the nomination, let alone in a general campaign against someone with the unimpeachable character of John McCain.

Untied States of America

Just as talk of partitioning Iraq dies down, up pops some sentiment for dismembering our own country.

Although their motives and political philosophies are worlds apart, the Middlebury Institute and the League of the South are hosting a two-day Secessionist Convention today in Chattanooga.

The Middlebury Institute of upstate New York, whose members are unhappy about the Iraq war and “federal imperialism,” shares the idea of states becoming independent republics with the Southern group, which insists it is not racist despite a Confederate Battle Flag on its banner and its opposition to amnesty for immigrants.

Middlebury director Kirpatrick Sale says the co-sponsorship is intended to show that "the folks up north regard you as legitimate colleagues."

Kirk Sale’s name conjures up memories of the 1960s when he was a student leader of S.D.S. at Cornell, protesting among other social ills, racism and the war in Vietnam. He has gone on to become a respected scholar and author, a self-described neo-Luddite who has written a sympathetic treatise about the Unabomber.

Strange bedfellows, but Yeats too comes much to mind these days: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

It’s an odd world in which those who want to kill each other in Iraq insist on a central government and those here who differ about everything get together to talk about breaking away from their own.