Race and Republican Attacks on Obama

May 17, 2011, 11:46 am

By MATT BAI

William B. Plowman/NBC NEWS, via Associated PressIn an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called President Obama a “food stamp president.”

Newt Gingrich did his level best to appear level in his “Meet the Press” interview Sunday, maintaining a mostly subdued, thoughtful tone except for one telling moment — when David Gregory, the host, asked him if his labeling of President Obama as the “food stamp president” might have racist connotations. “Oh, come on,” the former House speaker huffed. “That’s bizarre.” All he meant, Mr. Gingrich went on to explain, was that Mr. Obama’s policies would turn all of America into Detroit, which probably didn’t endear him to Eminem.

POLITICAL TIMES Matt Bai’s analysis and commentary.

That exchange led to some spirited discussion among me and my fellow round-table analysts, both on and off camera. The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne accused Mr. Gingrich of “doubling down” on racial connotations by choosing Detroit to make his point. I tweeted from the green room that Mr. Gingrich’s listing of American identity as a core theme of his campaign sounded “ominous” and, when asked to explain this, I said it sounded like an appeal to a “dark current in American politics.”
But Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, rejected this interpretation. If there were a “dark current” running through the attacks on Mr. Obama, she told us, it represented a kind of conspiratorial populism in American politics generally and had nothing to do with racism.
This is a debate that is likely to surface many more times in the next 18 months, no matter whom the Republicans nominate, and the truth seems to me a little more complex than partisans on either side might suggest.
Is there a racial element to some of the attacks on President Obama? It’s pretty hard to argue there isn’t, when a conservative writer like Dinesh D’Souza argues that Mr. Obama sees the world like an African nationalist (a theory Mr. Gingrich praised again in his interview Sunday), or when Donald J. Trump asserts that Mr. Obama isn’t smart enough to have gotten into Harvard or to have written his own books.
But here’s the thing: race and cultural otherness were powerful undercurrents in Republican politics long before the nation’s first black president came along. The infamous Willie Horton ad that George Bush deployed against Michael Dukakis in 1988, you may recall, was more overtly racist than anything Mr. Obama had to parry 20 years later. Bill Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore were all portrayed as being well outside America’s white, Christian mainstream.
Mr. Gingrich’s “food stamp” line is an homage of sorts to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.” This business about turning America into Detroit is exactly the kind of thing Mr. Reagan would have said, if he hadn’t been so busy trying to win Michigan’s electoral votes.
So to say that Mr. Obama is being cast as somehow alien to the white American experience simply because he is black really does miss the point. He would still be cast in this way if he were an urban, northern Democrat who happened to be white. The fact that Mr. Obama is black may even blunt the attack to some extent, because Republican challengers have to be more careful in how they raise these kinds of cultural issues than they would with your standard-issue white liberal.
In fact, there are tactical reasons for Republicans to consider scrapping the cultural argument altogether when it comes to Mr. Obama, or at least minimizing it.
After all, we have now reached the point where a 45-year-old American voter has no memory of civil rights marches or the silent majority and grew up in a society where overt racism was uniformly stigmatized. In this new environment, you’re probably not well advised to make racial alienation a centerpiece of your campaign, unless you want to offend half the voting public, including most of the independent voters who decide the outcome of a general election.
Beyond that, of course, there are basic responsibilities of political leadership. Themes of otherness are always most prevalent, and most dangerous, at moments of economic or existential anxiety; think of the Know-Nothings or the Red Scare. History tells us that giving them voice does nothing to address the issues of the day. The job of true leaders in such a moment isn’t to leap into that dark current I was talking about, but rather to point their followers toward some more ennobling way downstream.