“Take one of them,” liberal blogger Spencer Ackerman wrote during the 2008 election, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: Why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems?”
In all likelihood, Ackerman (a good defense writer) was swept up by election-season passion and looking to retaliate against what he saw as unscrupulous conservative attacks (regarding Jeremiah Wright, in this case). But we know this is how the Left plays hardball. Byron York, now my Examiner colleague, summed up well this “standard rhetorical device of the Left: If you can’t win an argument with a conservative, call him a racist.”
Now that a conservative black Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain, is taking the type of fire that any serious White House contender should expect, some conservatives are reaching for their own race card.
Barack Obama dabbled in this four years ago, asserting in his stump speech that attacks on him would come down to “did I mention he’s black?” Since the long presidential campaign began for real this summer, liberal MNSBC host Ed Schultz has found racism in any imaginable conservative critique of Obama, including a Rick Perry reference to a “black cloud” of national debt.
The point of playing the race card is to get your opponent to shut up. It’s to create a high cost for anyone staking out the opposing position. It’s cynical. It poisons public discourse. And it actually fosters real racism in two ways: by stoking racial hostility and by making it harder for the public to distinguish between actual racism and everything falsely called racism.
Last week, after Politico reported that two women had filed sexual harassment complaints against Cain in the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh called it a “racially charged attack.” Limbaugh said: “What is known as the mainstream media goes for the ugliest racial stereotypes they can to attack a black conservative.”
Americans for Herman Cain, an independent SuperPAC not affiliated with the campaign, used Limbaugh’s quote in a TV ad that also twice recalled Clarence Thomas’s charge that those trying to sink his Supreme Court nomination in 1991 were attempting “a high-tech lynching.”
The truth about the sexual harassment charges against Cain is still murky. But even if Cain never sexually harassed anyone, and even if he is the victim of a dirty attack, there are no grounds for calling this “racially charged.” The simplest explanation, even if this is a “smear,” is that it’s a political smear.
Cain has moved to the head of the polls for the Republican presidential nomination two months before voting begins. Anyone in that position will be the target of attacks, both fair and unfair. In 2008, the New York Times published a front page story speculating, with zero facts, whether John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist. Politics is a nasty game, and the liberal mainstream media often doesn’t play fair, especially if you’re a Republican.
Here is where Thomas and Cain’s defenders are correct, though: Democrats are particularly eager to tear down conservative minorities, because prominent black or Hispanic conservatives pose a threat to the Democrats’ dominance of these voting blocs while diluting the Left’s narrative that the GOP is for whites only.
Remember when Democratic Senate staffers flagged conservative judicial nominee Miguel Estrada as “especially dangerous … because he is Hispanic.” And Clarence Thomas was correct that hatred towards him was virulent because he deviated from what the Left expects of politically involved blacks.
But when Thomas used the term “high-tech lynching,” he lowered himself to the level of demagogues on the Left who liken tax cuts to racism, limited-government to slavery, and Republicans to Bull Connor.
When the Super PAC “Americans for Herman Cain” repurposed Thomas’s overheated phrase for Cain, it was worse than just sensationalistic — it was embarrassing and cynical.
As things get difficult for Obama’s reelection next year, we can expect the president’s proxies and defenders to use charges of racism in an effort to discredit his critics. Such charges always hurt feelings, but they have been cheapened so much by the Al Sharptons and Ed Schultzes of the world that they’ve lost their political potency.
The last things conservatives should want to do is lend some legitimacy to the race card.
Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
