Master Baiting
Salon's Alex Koppelman writes that, "Over time Republicans have learned how to play the race card more effectively, which is to say more subtly with each passing electoral cycle."
Of course, the Democrats, who routinely reap >90% of the black vote, are not in any way, shape, or form playing the race card, only advocating policies which just-so-happen-perchance to benefit the interests of the median African-American voter, or to be precise all those to the left and 2-3 standard deviations to the right, all of whom weighed their decision with Solomonic solemnity. Pure coincidence!
Is there any demographic out there which votes for one party anywhere so uniformly? Utah, which is so white that from space it looks like the polar ice caps, voted ~73% for Bush, which I'd guesstimate to mean that more Mormons in Salt Lake City voted for Kerry than black residents of any city voted for Bush. Nope, no race-baiting there!
Of course, "I know you are but what am I" isn't a principled stand. But the accusations of race-baiting by McCain are also ludicrous on their face. Koppelman writes,
There is something of a soft bigotry of lowered expectations going on here. Back when liberals accused Lee Atwater & co. of race-baiting, they were at least using live bait, e.g. Willie Horton. McCain's "Celebrity" ad accuses a half-term Senator of being perhaps a little over-enamored of his own grandeur for going on a glitzier world tour than Gerald Ford ever did as President-for-real, and makes the point by comparing him to the two most famous-for-being-famous celebutards of the moment, both of whom are white and female. To find a coded racial message in this, one needs not a magnifying glass and powder to dust for prints, but dowsing rods and a Ouija board.
Salon's Alex Koppelman writes that, "Over time Republicans have learned how to play the race card more effectively, which is to say more subtly with each passing electoral cycle."
Of course, the Democrats, who routinely reap >90% of the black vote, are not in any way, shape, or form playing the race card, only advocating policies which just-so-happen-perchance to benefit the interests of the median African-American voter, or to be precise all those to the left and 2-3 standard deviations to the right, all of whom weighed their decision with Solomonic solemnity. Pure coincidence!
Is there any demographic out there which votes for one party anywhere so uniformly? Utah, which is so white that from space it looks like the polar ice caps, voted ~73% for Bush, which I'd guesstimate to mean that more Mormons in Salt Lake City voted for Kerry than black residents of any city voted for Bush. Nope, no race-baiting there!
Of course, "I know you are but what am I" isn't a principled stand. But the accusations of race-baiting by McCain are also ludicrous on their face. Koppelman writes,
The political science literature on this "new racism" also helps explain why, as the recent Rasmussen poll found, only 22 percent of Americans found John McCain's Spears/Hilton negative ad against Barack Obama racist, but 59 percent thought Obama's dollar-bill comment in response to the ad was racist.
There is something of a soft bigotry of lowered expectations going on here. Back when liberals accused Lee Atwater & co. of race-baiting, they were at least using live bait, e.g. Willie Horton. McCain's "Celebrity" ad accuses a half-term Senator of being perhaps a little over-enamored of his own grandeur for going on a glitzier world tour than Gerald Ford ever did as President-for-real, and makes the point by comparing him to the two most famous-for-being-famous celebutards of the moment, both of whom are white and female. To find a coded racial message in this, one needs not a magnifying glass and powder to dust for prints, but dowsing rods and a Ouija board.
posted by The Snob at
12:56 PM
2 Comments:
Where's Don Imus when we need him...
I agree that it's pretty ludicrous to attribute racial overtones to McCain's "Celebrity" ad. However, it's equally ludicrous to describe Obama's "dollar-bill" comments as a reaction to that ad, at least without mentioning the fact that the McCain team had previously created an online ad where they morphed Obama's face onto a 100 dollar bill. I'd be willing to bet that, if the respondents polled by Rassmussen were given that particular piece of information, a significantly lower percentage than 59% would have seen Obama's comments as racist.
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