Racism Is Alive, Well’ Says Democrat Ed Towns; Greg Meeks: ‘Racial’
by Jason Horowitz | October 7, 2008 | Tags: PoliticsBarack ObamaJohn McCainSarah Palin This article was published in the October 13, 2008, edition of The New York Observer.
As the McCain campaign ratchets up the intensity of its attacks on Barack Obama, some black elected officials are calling the tactics desperate, unseemly and racist.
“They are trying to throw out these codes,” said Representative Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York.
“He’s ‘not one of us?’” Mr. Meeks said, referring to a comment Sarah Palin made at a campaign rally on Oct. 6 in Florida. “That’s racial. That’s fear. They know they can’t win on the issues, so the last resort they have is race and fear.”
“Racism is alive and well in this country, and McCain and Palin are trying to appeal to that and it’s unfortunate,” said Representative Ed Towns, also from New York.
In recent days, as polls have shown a steady lead for the Democratic ticket, Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin have used reports of Mr. Obama’s loose association with Bill Ayers, a former member of the ’60s radical group the Weather Underground, as evidence that he is different from them.
“Our opponent,” Ms. Palin told donors in Englewood, Colo., “is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”
She added, “This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America,” she said. “We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism.”
An Associated Press analysis characterized those remarks as “unsubstantiated” and carrying “a racially tinged subtext.”
Neither Mr. McCain nor Ms. Palin has backed off the line of attack.
Again invoking Mr. Obama’s intermittent encounters with Mr. Ayers, Mr. McCain asked a crowd in Albuquerque, N.M., on Oct. 6, “Who is the real Barack Obama?” Someone in the crowd screamed in reply, “a terrorist!” Mr. McCain grimaced, but kept going.
Before Ms. Palin took the stage in Estero, Fla., at the Oct. 6 event, one of the introductory speakers, Mike Scott, the sheriff of Lee County, referred to the Democratic candidate as “Barack Hussein Obama,” a practice the McCain campaign has distanced itself from in the past. Apparently, no longer. Ms. Palin also said that she had advised Mr. McCain to “take the gloves off” and said Mr. Obama was “not one of us.”
David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and an expert on African-American issues, said that most Americans were too busy worrying about their economic future to concentrate on Mr. McCain’s comments on the stump. To the extent that people were listening, though, he said his remarks would be “not just crossing the line but introducing serious ugliness into the race.”
Other black members of Congress, all Democrats who support Mr. Obama, said they were dismayed by the new and vicious tenor of the McCain attacks.
“If McCain’s attacks don’t cross the line, they’re certainly teetering on it,” said Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois. “He is certainly appealing to people’s fears and not their hopes.”
Mr. Jackson took issue with the McCain campaign’s attack on Mr. Obama’s connection to Mr. Ayers, who committed acts of domestic terrorism when Mr. Obama was 8 years old, and contrasted that with Mr. McCain’s long relationships with erstwhile supporters of segregation in the Senate like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond.
“Should McCain be held responsible for having served with segregationalists when he was 8 years old, 18 years old, 28 years old, 38 years old, 48 years old, 58 years old, 68 years old?” Mr. Jackson said. “Did he ever meet with any of them? Did he ever conference with them or work with them? Did McCain quit the Senate instead of work with them?”
He added: “Did Sarah Palin throw her husband out of the house for advocating secession from the union?”
“I guess they are suggesting that he is a terrorist; it’s just patently absurd,” said Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia. “John McCain himself said he wouldn’t participate in such things, but I guess that changes when you’re losing.”
“Some may say their true colors are showing,” said Representative Yvette Clarke of New York. “Others may say they’re just not being thoughtful. But certainly a lot of the language I’ve heard I consider to be incendiary. I believe it is meant to generate a certain sentiment within their base that engenders fear and certainly appeals to a group of people within our society who would pursue this along racial lines.
“It’s very clear,” she said.
Ms. Clarke also found a racial subtext in Ms. Palin’s repeated appeals to “Joe Six-Pack” and “hockey moms.”
“Who exactly is Joe Six-Pack and who are these hockey moms? That’s what I’d like to know,” she said. “Is that supposed to be terminology that is of common ground to all Americans? I don’t find that. It leaves a lot of people out.”
New York State Senator Bill Perkins, an early supporter of Mr. Obama, said, “They are obviously playing on people’s fears and prejudices in a desperate way. While not explicitly relating to race, they are clearly creating the opportunity for those inclined to come to those conclusions. I think it is going to become more explicit as we move forward. It’s subtle now, but not so subtle as to be mistaken.”
And Kevin Parker, a New York state senator from Brooklyn, said, “If you have to remind people that Barack Obama is African-American, you have reached the bottom.”
In response to the Obama supporters’ comments, McCain campaign spokesman Peter Feldman provided the following statement: “It is disappointing that Barack Obama and his supporters continue to play the race card from the bottom of the deck. This is a tactic that the Obama Campaign has used before, and which McCain campaign manager Rick Davis correctly called ‘divisive, shameful, and wrong.’ It is legitimate for John McCain to ask questions about Barack Obama’s relationship with the unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers because Senator Obama has not been truthful about this relationship. Many Americans want these questions answered. Despite the fact that Barack Obama has been running for president since joining the Senate, many Americans are still wondering, ‘who is Barack Obama?’ These comments are a sure sign of a flailing campaign that refuses to be honest with voters and that is bordering on desperation.”
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underdog
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Re:Get Ready for Cries of Racism at Every Turn - 2008/10/09 00:56There is more whining about alleged "racism" just because some treasurer of the McCain campaign wrote an editorial in the Buchanan County newspaper. Here are some of the details. Link to more information below...
REPARATIONS TO BLACK COMMUNITY: Opposes before Election Day and supports after Election Day.
FREEDOM OF RELIGION: Mandatory Black Liberation Theology classes taught in all churches - raise taxes to pay for this mandate. Put Rev. Jeremiah Wright in charge. Condemnation of homosexuality from the pulpit will become a Class 1 Felony.
HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE: Raise taxes. And coddle sexual perverts. Give tax breaks for NAMBLA membership fees.
DRUG CRISIS: Raise taxes to pay for free drugs for Obama’s inner-city political base.
ABORTION: Anywhere, anytime, for anyone for any reason up to 9 months and send taxpayers the bill. Encourage Partial Birth Abortion.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: Keep buying foreign oil and sending billions to Muslim countries that hate us and want to destroy us. [Wait, isn't that the Republican platform?]
2ND AMENDMENT: Under Obama will only apply to gang-bangers, illegal aliens, Islamo-Fascist terrorists, and Senator Jim Webb’s aide.
THE WHITE HOUSE: Hire rapper Ludacris to “paint it black.” Taxes to be increased to buy enough paint for the job plus spray-paint for graffiti.
THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES: Raise taxes to send $845 billion, most of it to Africa so the Obama family there can skim off enough for them to free their goats and live the American Dream.
NATIONAL ANTHEM: Change to the “Black National Anthem” by James Weldon Johnson. And raise taxes.
U.S. FLAG: Replace 50 stars with a star and crescent logo; red stripes changed to green to represent Obama’s tree-hugging radical environmentalism and his lack of experience. Flag lapel pins, having become a substitute for “real patriotism,” will henceforth be banned. And raise taxes.
U.S. MILITARY: Confiscate all weapons, substitute water pistols, pea shooters and bows with suction cup arrows. Replace U.S. flags on uniforms with peace symbols changing uniform color from green to pink and abolishing the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, replacing it with “A queer in every foxhole and a camouflage sex toy in every backpack” requirement. Condoms will be issues instead of bullets and brotherly love will be encouraged. Barney Frank will be the new Secretary of Defense (renamed Secretary of Peace and Love) and Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Lindsay Lohan, and Rick Boucher will all be made 5-star generals. And raise taxes.
Geeze. Can't "these people" take a JOKE? The guy has now resigned under pressure. McCain had to throw him under the bus just because he was... how should I put this? A "bigot"? Yeah, that's the word.
How many racial bogeyman have Obama operatives and sympathetic journalists discovered lurking in “coded language” and attire? Let us count the ways:
*At Tuesday’s presidential debate, John McCain referred to Obama as “that one.” Official Obama press agitator Bill Burton sent off an e-mail blast to reporters: “Did John McCain just refer to Obama as ‘that one’?” Horrors. Taking their cue from Burton, spooked Obama supporters hyperventilated like teenagers on the set of the Blair Witch Project movie. “The racial undertones were subtle but unmistakable,” declared Maya Wiley of the leftist Center for Social Inclusion. “McCain was tapping into a current of superiority among white voters. It was an attempt to ‘[b]otherize’ Obama.”[/b]
“Otherize?” Sounds like something you do to your car tires to prepare for winter.
UC Berkeley linguistics prof George Lakoff was also haunted by “That One:” “The phrase was meant to say, ‘You and I are in the same area, but he’s the outsider.’”
Memo to McCain: Next time, call him “The One.”
*Obama supporters on the heavily-traffic Democratic Underground website (where such mainstream Democrats as Elizabeth Edwards hang out) saw the ghost of the Ku Klux Klan in Sarah Palin’s white suit jacket. Yes, white clothes = racism.
“Palin is wearing white again, inciting the racist crowds. She should just drop all pretense and put on her white hood and light up a cross. She is a despicable human being,” fumed a DU poster. “Grand Princess of the KKK,” proclaimed another. They’re “trying to send subtle signals to their rabid base,” yet another member of Obama’s rabid base declared.
My racial decoder ring must be on the fritz. Because I’m not getting the signal. If she wears white stockings, drinks a vanilla milk shake, and refers to budgetary black holes, are those incitements, too? And what about her gorgeous white teeth? Perhaps she should drink more coffee — hold the white cream! — to avoid emitting further racial radiation.
*Such paranoia is not limited to the fever swamps of the Internet. Earlier this week, the Associated Press disseminated an “analysis” accusing Palin of injecting a “racial tinge” into the campaign because she criticized Obama for his longtime relationship with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Palin’s comments were completely unobjectionable: “This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.”
I saw a vice presidential candidate drawing stark philosophical differences between two tickets. The AP saw Freddy Krueger with lipstick and a noose.
“Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as ‘not like us’ is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American,” the AP piece frothed.
Obama is half-black. Ayers is white. One of the Weather Underground’s victims was black police officer Waverly Brown of Nyack, New York. Where do I buy a pair of the super X-ray glasses that can detect the racism in Palin’s remarks about the Obama-Ayers alliance?
*I’ll have to borrow those hysterical-colored spectacles from Time’s Karen Tumulty, who spotted racist goblins in the recent McCain ad criticizing Obama for seeking advice from Fannie Mae corruptocrat, Franklin Raines. “Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman,” Tumulty balked in a blog post titled “McCain plays the race card.”
Um, “sinister?” The ad’s photos of Obama and Raines were standard shots — some with dour expressions, others smiling. The fact that Tumulty perceived them as “sinister” suggests that she should perform a self-racism exam before diagnosing anyone else.
*A parade of Congressional witch hunters for Obama also detects the specter of George Wallace behind every policy bush. Democrat New York Gov. David Paterson says conservative criticism of Obama’s community organizing days is code for “black.” Democrat Rep. Gregory Meeks complained to the New York Observer: “They are trying to throw out these codes.” In the same piece, Democrat Rep. Yvette Clark divined segregationist intent in Palin’s references to Joe Six Pack and hockey moms. “It leaves a lot of people out.”
And Democrat Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid echoed Time’s Tumulty on the McCain camp’s Obama/Raines broadsides: “The only connection that people could bring up about Raines and Barack Obama is that they both are African-American, other than that there is nothing.”
The Washington Post reported that Obama’s office phoned up Raines for housing advice and has stood by its reporting. Is the newspaper part of the McCain/Palin hooded racists’ coven, too?
Obama’s witch hunters better beware. When there’s racism in every hiccup, nobody’s air supply is safe.
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Here we go: