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New York Times

September 13, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Boy, Oh, Boy

By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”

Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black.

Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.

“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!

It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”

Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”

The polarization card

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | September 15, 2009

IN HIS 1969 book, political analyst Kevin Phillips envisioned Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy becoming an “Emerging Republican Majority.’’ A New York Times review said, “Full racial polarization is an essential ingredient of Phillips’ political pragmatism. He wants to seek a black Democratic party, particularly in the South, because this will drive into the Republican party precisely the kind of anti-Negro whites who will help constitute the emerging majority.’’

While a distressing amount of what Phillips foretold came to pass for many years, the poison of polarization finally faded enough to see the election of Barack Obama. Today the Republicans are the shrinking minority, who, with no strategy to improve the country, have only the polarization card to play.

The most noteworthy evidence of late is, of course, the “You lie!’’ from South Carolina’s Joe Wilson as Obama delivered his national address to Congress on health care. It was a double-barreled blast. One was a shout out for white Americans who somewhere in their psyche cannot respect a black president. The other, since it came as Obama said undocumented people would not be covered under his health care proposals, was a political bullet aimed at immigrants south of our borders, who mostly happen to be brown.

Having no strategy always compounds the mistakes. Minutes after Wilson forever became part of joint session lore and Obama closed with Senator Ted Kennedy’s appeal to the better part of our historical character, the Republicans trotted out Representative Charles Boustany of Louisiana to deliver their party response. They did so thinking that Boustany, a heart surgeon, would lend the gravitas against “government-run’’ health insurance to make Obama’s proposals seem all the more grave.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called Boustany the “perfect guy to give our response.’’ You do not have to wonder why, when Louisiana was one of the most polarized states in the presidential election. Eighty-four percent of white voters voted for Republican John McCain, despite the disastrous economy and two wars handed them by McCain’s standard-bearer, President Bush. Boustany has also been one of those “birthers,’’ floating with his scalpel in right-wing wacko space, harping that Obama is not an American citizen. Boustany has said, “I think there are questions. We’ll have to see.’’

Even without race as an issue, Boustany was as imperfect a choice the Republicans could have made to demonstrate they know how to fix health care. The United Health Foundation, the American Public Health Association, and the Partnership for Prevention ranked Louisiana dead last in 2008 among the 50 states for the overall health of its people, hugely because of its high percentages of people without health insurance, preventable hospitalization, infant mortality, cancer deaths, cardiovascular deaths, and overall premature deaths. The Trust for America’s Health had similar findings in its 2008 rankings. The infant mortality rate in Louisiana, according to the United Health Foundation report, is more than triple that of Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

A week before that, Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer threw out the red meat of Red Scares to the talk shows by saying that Obama’s planned back-to-school address would spread “socialist ideology’’ to schoolchildren. This is the same state where Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin worked up the crowd into such a lather about Obama that a supporter shouted “Kill him.’’ Palin said about Obama, “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America.’’

The danger in this is obvious. It is one thing to disagree with the president. It is another to disrespect the office and delegitimize his citizenship. America still has too many gun-toting crazies for the Republicans to yell “You lie!’’ in a crowded theater. Despite all of the actual falsehoods that got us into Iraq and cost us thousands of lives of American soldiers, President Bush did not endure in his entire eight years what Obama is undergoing in his first eight months. Too many Republicans are still trying to drive anti-Negro whites into the fold. The question is whether America can fold this chapter of politics for good.

Agree one thousand percent. There is prejudice, hysteria, bigotry alive and well. Maureen hit the nail on the head and now Jimmy Carter also went right to the dirt of the hysteria.

It's been my expeirience that Racist hide behind calling others racist. Maureen Dowd can just make up things she heard people say? Thats laughable. So I guess I think I heard Obama say the hell with you dissenting crackers in his speech, just as laughable. The left uses the race card when they can't win a debate on it's merits. It has been shown that the President is telling fibs.
Segregation was racist, slavery was racist, diagreeing with the president, NOT RACIST. The word gets thrown around way too much, and cheapens the efforts of those who fought for civil rights.
Jimmy Carter is on record as a full blown anti-semite, that is racist. Probably the worst President in my lifetime, looks like Obama will follow his foot steps, to bad. We as a country have missed a huge opportunity, Obama was suppose to be a uniter, he's not. If he was he would come out and squash all this hogwash.