Voters: Racism Is Not the Problem
National Journal Magazine
by Stuart Taylor Jr.
Wright aside, if Obama’s race were a net liability with voters, he would have had no chance of winning the nomination.
Is Barack Obama–now closer than ever to winning the Democratic nomination–nonetheless at a political disadvantage because of white racism, or “racial fears,” or “race-baiting,” or racial “double standards,” as some commentators have suggested?
The evidence indicates otherwise, as it pertains both to this election and more broadly to the perennial tendency of many in the racial-grievance groups, the media, and academia to exaggerate how much white racism remains and its impact on African-Americans.
But many of the voters who have been unfairly tarred as racist do have a different flaw that Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain are working especially hard to exploit: ignorance of elementary economics and other things every high school graduate should know, which accounts for the low quality of the debate on issues ranging from the gas tax to trade to the budget.
More on voter ignorance later. First, let’s examine the notion that white racism, or efforts to fan it, underlie Obama’s recent difficulties in winning over middle-class white voters.
“It is an injustice, a legacy of the racist threads of this nation’s history,” The New York Times declared in an April 30 editorial, that Obama was so widely called upon to repudiate the Rev. Jeremiah Wright while the media have given much less attention to McCain’s courtship of an equally bigoted white, far-right Texas pastor named John Hagee. The editorial pre-emptively condemned as “race-baiting” any campaign ads showing Wright in action. Times columnist Frank Rich and PBS commentator Bill Moyers voiced similar complaints. And Steve Kornacki wrote in the April 29 New York Observer that Wright was being and will be “used to stoke racial fears and prejudices about Mr. Obama.”
