I realize I have written before about the racism that lies barely beneath the surface at all times within today's Republican Party and which is increasingly boiling over into open view. I believe that it is relevant for several reasons: (1) it shows how far this nation has to go in terms of racial peace, (2) it shows the venomous hate that is now so much of a prominent part of the mindset of a once great national political party, and (3) the effort to make one "other" and "scary" is remarkably similar to what the Christianists and their allies do to LGBT citizens. Clearly, the racial slurs and dehumanizing tactics of the birthers and teabaggers must be countered and those in the GOP leadership who allow such disgusting conduct to persist need to be called out and castigated as well. Joan Walsh at Salon has a good column today that looks at this vile phenomenon and the backwater areas of the country where it thrives the most:*
When South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson screamed "You lie!" at President Obama Wednesday night, he dragged the paranoia and anti-Obama contempt that marked so many August "town hells" into the chambers of Congress. . . . Of course Obama never had the support of whites like Joe Wilson, a solid son of the South who served as an aide to segregationist Strom Thurmond and who publicly doubted and derided Thurmond's biracial daughter, Essie Mae, when she went public about her dad's identity. Obama lost South Carolina to John McCain handily, just as he lost most of the rest of the region.
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I started thinking opponents were blackening Obama back in July, after the racial drama of the Sotomayor hearings, when poor oppressed Caucasians like Sens. Jeff Sessions, Tom Coburn and Lindsey Graham made it sound like it was open season on white guys.
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Birthers and Deathers (who tended to be the same people) were focused on marginalizing Obama as scary, "the other." Race was central to their fears, from the Birthers' obsession with Obama's literal origins as the product of miscegenation; to the Deathers and the Town Hellers' insistence that healthcare reform was, in Glenn Beck's idiotic formulation, Obama's idea of "reparations" for slavery. The cries of "socialism" were just another way to mark him as "other," scary and foreign. Watching scenes of shrieking, sobbing people pleading to "take our country back," it was hard not to ask, From who? The president who got a larger share of the vote than Ronald Reagan in 1980 or George Bush in 2000? What exactly is it that makes this particular commander in chief an interloper?
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Finally, when Republicans began objecting to Obama's speaking to schoolkids last week, you couldn't ignore the racism: Listening to some parents' expressing actual fear of having Obama beamed into their kids' classrooms, it was hard to imagine such hysteria being inspired by a white president. It would never happen.
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And while I think race, and racism, have played a role in the angry yelling of the Birthers and Deathers, and in the despicable contempt Wilson showed the president in Congress last week, I think most of the president's troubles with white voters have to do with political doubt his enemies have sown about his programs -- after Obama, in my opinion, was too slow to push his own clear proposals, especially for healthcare.
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Obama may never get a larger share of the white vote than he got last November (which was good enough, after all, for a comfortable win). But if he compromises with the Republicans who are out to get him, he risks losing the support of the multiracial base that put him in the White House. Sticking to his (metaphorical) guns is both good policy, and good politics.
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I do agree with Walsh that Obama needs to push forward much more forcefully on healthcare and other "change" agenda items on which he campaigned. In the meanwhile, blacks, gays, Jews, Hispanics, and other cultural and/or religious minorities need to realize that ALL of us are seen as enemies by the birther and teabagging set. Therefore we need to support policies that help us all rather than allow the far right and false Christians to divide us.
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