Well, I believe in asking questions about a white man from the Carolinas who wouldn't quickly and forcefully disassociate himself from a ranter with a decades-long record of spewing racist and sexist crap. Today, Bob Herbert digs up a transcript from 1998 where Mike Wallace gets confirmation that Imus "told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car, coming home, that [show sidekick] Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes.� Should that be forgiven, too? Edwards needs to "see how this works out, before I make a judgment" that he'll never go on the Imus show again? Really?
That's a bonehead response. There was plenty of political hay to be made here, and some real values that needed to be defended. Edwards missed an important opportunity to show solidarity with the women's and African-American groups that were calling for Imus's ouster -- alliances that he'll need if he makes it to the South Carolina primary and wants to do more than make an appeal to the few white guys who still vote Democratic in that state. Herbert writes:
It appears that on this issue the general public, and the women at Mr. Imus�s former network, are far ahead of the establishment figures, the politicians and the media biggies, who were always so anxious to appear on the show and to defend Mr. Imus.But not all the politicians were that out to lunch. Clinton and Obama got it. It's just the leading white male Democrat running for president who tempered his condemnation with caution and more mercy than was shown by such great progressive institutions as American Express, GlaxoSmithKline, and Ditech.com, all of which have said they will never again advertise on the show.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Being able to beat back attacks on women is going to be a requirement in an election in which a woman is running. This is a task all the candidates are going to have to figure out how to do, at the risk of looking like wimps if they fail to perform. It's primitive social relations 101: Defend the honor of women. A man who cannot stand up for women when they are insulted looks weak. And Edwards just proved that when faced with a fight about principles, not politics -- a fight about other people's dignity, and not of his own future -- he's not nearly as strong as he'd started to seem.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
