The news media have been shamefully stoking the idea that the only way
Barack Obama could possibly lose the presidential election is if American
racists have their way. Indeed, the fact that Obama isn't leading in polls
by a wide margin "doesn't make sense ... unless it's race," says CNN's Jack
Cafferty.
Slate's Jacob Weisberg says Obama is losing among older white voters because
of the "color of his skin."
Many journalists are so committed to the racism-explains-everything line
they are labeling any effective anti-Obama ad as an attempt by John McCain
to "viciously exacerbate" America's "race-fueled angst," in the words of one
New York magazine writer.
For example, a McCain ad noted that Franklin Raines, the Clinton-appointed
former head of Fannie Mae who helped bring about the current Wall Street
meltdown, advised the Obama campaign. Time's Karen Tumulty gasped that
because Raines is black, McCain is playing the race card.
Why, she wants to know, didn't McCain attack Obama's even stronger ties to
the even more culpable former Fannie Mae chairman, Jim Johnson, who had to
resign from Obama's vice presidential search team because of his sketchy
dealings with mortgage giant Countrywide Financial? "One reason might be
that Johnson is white; Raines is black," Tumulty suggests.
Or another reason might be that the McCain campaign was saving that attack
for its next ad, which is what happened.
According to critics, McCain's "celebrity" ads featuring Paris Hilton and
Britney Spears were nothing but tawdry race-baiting because they
subliminally played on white America's fear of black men violating the
delicate flowers of white American womanhood. You'd think a cognitive
warning bell would have gone off the moment anyone started suggesting that
Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are icons of chastity.
This spectacle is grotesque. It reveals how little the supposedly objective
press corps thinks of the American people - and how highly they think of
themselves ... and Obama. Obama's lack of experience, his doctrinaire
liberalism, his record, his known associations with Weatherman radical
William Ayers and the hate-mongering Rev. Jeremiah Wright: These cannot
possibly be legitimate motivations to vote against Obama, in this view.
Similarly, McCain's experience, his record of bipartisanship, his heroism:
These too count for nothing.
Racism is all there is. Obama wins, and America sheds its racial past. Obama
loses, and we're a nation of "Bull" Connors. Continued... |