I often enjoy Jonathan Martin‘s blog, but I’m baffled by two posts that went up in the past 24 hours. In the first post, Martin asserts that McCain is essentially going to be accused of racism no matter what he does:
John McCain is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He could never mention Jeremiah Wright and ensure his campaign aides don’t either, and he’d still be accused of running a racist campaign.
Have his tactics against Obama in recent days gotten more personal and hard-edged? Yes. Are his top surrogates, including his running mate, suggesting that the Democrat is a terrorist sympathizer who is not a patriot? Yes.
But is McCain doing anything overtly racist? No.
Martin adds:
As Harold Ford Jr. told me in Nashville: “If Barack were not African-American, they’d be doing this.”
Indeed they would. Just look at some of the GOP tactics questioning how much John Kerry, a white Vietnam veteran, cared about the troops.
Yet today, posting a video from a McCain-Palin rally in which zealous supporters insist that Obama is in fact, a “terrorist” based on his “bloodline” and “name,” Martin remarks:
Party activists of the sort who show up at rallies always tend to be more partisan, but it’s difficult to imagine even the most hard-core conservatives saying that Al Gore or John Kerry were terrorists.
It’s a testament to how powerful those viral emails about Obama have been and just how much some on the right are blissfully happy to believe untruths about the man.
So Republicans aren’t running a racist campaign, they’ve just managed to convince their base that some of the lies about Obama’s background are true in a way they could never have if the candidate were white. This is akin to Kristof’s bizarre conclusion that what we have is “racism without racists,” because white people don’t actually consciously acknowledge that they’re being racist. As though “real racism” requires premeditation, and as if the McCain campaign is simply unaware of what their supporters believe.
How exactly did McCain supporters come up with these ideas? It wasn’t simply a matter of Obama’s name, it was a result of media forces on the Right consciously spreading rumors and lies in the interest of getting the Republican elected. It’s naive to think that the McCain campaign isn’t conscious of the fact that when they say Obama “pals around with terrorists” they’re thinking of a short white guy and not what they imagine “Arabs” or “Muslims” look like. To say that the McCain campaign is not actively courting white racism, but merely benefiting from it by using rhetoric that their supporters respond to because it of their racial views, is a distinction without a difference. But as we see with Kristof, there is a deep an abiding need to rationalize the role of race in a way that maximizes white innocence.
Is McCain doing anything “overtly” racist? Does it only count if it’s “overt”?
–A. Serwer
