Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race. Harry Stein
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As a result, Clinton belatedly convened a White House conclave of prominent conservatives on the front lines of the racial debate in America. Among these was Connerly.
This is where the story gets interesting. As Connerly describes the meeting, Clinton was his usual eager-to-please self, alternately gregarious and earnest, and otherwise making every effort to appear open to his conservative guests’ views. But Vice President Gore, sitting beside him, openly seethed. While Connerly, who had recently gained national recognition leading the successful fight for passage of California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, was certainly accustomed to hostility, he was taken aback to encounter such naked loathing in such a setting. Always exceedingly civil with opponents, he tried to engage the vice president but without success. But it was Gore’s farewell that left the strongest impression. As Connerly describes it, after a cordial word of farewell from the president, he turned to Gore. The vice president grabbed his hand, “but instead of shaking it, he ground my palm and fingers in his grip as hard as he could. I felt the cartilage compress and almost cried out in pain. I looked at the vice president and he stared back at me with a slight smile as we walked out.”
Think of Gore as the very embodiment of advanced liberal thought (as indeed he thinks of himself proudly), and it makes a kind of horrific sense. For of course the aim of the racial Torquemadas is to crush free inquiry, especially if it involves innovative thinking from the right; and, whenever possible, to destroy reputations and careers along the way. Ask Newt Gingrich, who, in the wake of the 1994 Republican landslide that would make him House Speaker, famously broached the subject of orphanages as a possible means of salvaging the lives of inner-city welfare children doomed to lives of degradation and criminality. The reaction in the “child-advocacy community” was as immediate as it was predictable. Gingrich wanted “to take children away from their parents just because they are poor,” declared a spokesman for the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, while “pro-child” activist Joan Criswell wrote that “What Willie Horton was to Bush, the teenage welfare mother is to the Republican proponents of the Contract with America.” For its part, the mainstream press was little short of giddy at having been handed such a gift. “The party that professes to support family values seems excessively eager to yank poor children away from their mothers and dump them in institutions,” mocked the editorialists at the New York Times. Time magazine, also harping on “the proposal’s obvious incompatibility with ‘family values,’ ” was just one of the big-time outlets to summon up the term “Dickensian”; while Newsweek saw the new “Republican revolution” already slipping “toward enfizzlement.” The “idea of putting children into orphanages because their mothers couldn’t find jobs,” piled on Hillary Clinton, was “unbelievable and absurd,” and a few days later her husband devoted his weekly radio address to the subject. “There is no substitute—none—for the loving devotion and equally loving discipline of caring parents,” he intoned. “Governments don’t raise children; parents do.”
Gingrich briefly stood his ground, declaring he couldn’t “understand liberals who live in enclaves of safety who say, ‘Oh, this would be a terrible thing.’ ” But when he suggested that perhaps his opponents should take a look at the vintage Mickey Rooney orphanage film Boy’s Town, the mockery reached new heights, with presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos snickering that if Gingrich was looking for a work of fiction as a model, a far more useful one would be Oliver Twist.
Within days, Gingrich threw in the towel. Yet even now, at the very mention of the word “orphanage,” liberals rush to recall Gingrich and his misbegotten scheme. Indeed, it is a testament to how committed they remain to their discredited worldview that 27 years later—27 years that have only exacerbated the intractable problems of underclass Americans—another out-of-the-box Gingrich suggestion (that child labor laws might be modified to help imbue underclass kids with the work ethic so clearly absent in their communities) was greeted with equal scorn. NBC’s David Gregory spoke for many of his colleagues in denouncing the idea as “grotesque,” while others summoned up Ebenezer Scrooge and—who else?—Oliver Twist.
All of which brings us back to the attorney general’s fantastical—and calculated—call for honesty on race. In its wake, something funny started happening—something Holder and his boss and the hordes of professional race baiters in government, academia and the media never counted on: Lots of us have stopped playing along. There was more than a hint of it during the brouhaha over Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, the Harvard professor and presidential friend who in the summer of 2009 had a meltdown when cops stopped him trying to break into his own Cambridge home. Gates’s reflex to proclaim himself a victim of racism—and, Obama’s, to endorse that view, without so much as a wisp of evidence—turned the incident into the “teachable moment” the president declared it to be. But what it taught was not, as from long experience they had every reason to expect, that bigotry and police maltreatment of minorities thrive even in supposed bastions of tolerance and inclusion like Cambridge, but that instantly jumping to such a conclusion is itself prima facie evidence of a distorted worldview; and, more, that even the most blameless and forward-looking whites (for in this case, the accused cop had an exemplary record of service and racial sensitivity) can suddenly find themselves in the crosshairs of the racial enforcers. For here was Obama himself, so famously cautious and deliberative it took him months to choose a family dog, making it all too clear that, facts be damned, on this issue, the former community organizer wholeheartedly embraces the black victim/racist cop trope as fully as does the loathsome Al Sharpton.
Before it was over, even casual news followers understood that the very phrase “teachable moment” was a liberal dodge, hauled out whenever a prominent liberal gets into a serious fix involving race, and dutifully echoed by a compliant press. Lest we forget, Obama’s previous “teachable moment” had come at the low point of his presidential campaign, with the revelation that the man he’d embraced as his spiritual advisor regularly spouts the vilest kind of hateful tripe.
But the recognition that the racism trope was starting to lose its terrible power really took hold as the Tea Party movement came into prominence. Suddenly liberals were making the charge more promiscuously than ever, aiming it not at skinheads living in their parents’ basements or at would-be Klansmen, but at decent Americans with the temerity to object to presidential policies they believed damage both the quality of their lives and the nation itself: in short, at Americans acting in the best tradition of democratic citizenship. This was, pure and simple, as George Will observed, “McCarthyism of the left—devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data . . . a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas.”
Indeed, when a 2008 Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll reports that a mere 3 percent of Republicans (as opposed to 4 percent of Democrats) would refuse to vote for a black man for president, the charge was so obviously preposterous, and profoundly offensive, that literally millions who’d never before given the matter any thought could not but take notice. And what they saw is what has long been true: That the accusation of racism is almost invariably a crock—and that more than just an expression of (often contrived) liberal moral outrage, it’s intended to be the ultimate conversation stopper. As the conservative essayist and blogger Timothy Dalrymple aptly observed, “The accusation says more about the accusers than the accused.”
As Hollywood might say, this is the great reveal of Obama’s abortive “post-racial” candidacy and presidency. Early on, by virtue of his calculatedly moderate presentation, Obama seemed to a very great many to be precisely the idealized black leader (and, more, representative black man) that whites of all political persuasions yearned for in a national leader, someone who fully embraced, along with other traditional middle-class attitudes and values, their time-tested understanding of justice and fairness, and so would at last put an end to the racial divide. Instead we got an administration more recklessly promiscuous in its misuse of the racism charge than any in living memory. As cartoonist Bruce Tinsley had his cartoon duck reporter Mallard Fillmore mockingly intone at the height of the liberal attacks on Tea Partiers: “In other news, the Democratic National Committee has issued a recall of millions of race cards. . . . In a statement released yesterday, they admitted that while the cards had worked reliably for half a century, they have become worn-out and ineffective . . . and may blow up