Is slowing economic growth behind Obama's failure to dominate in the polls? Not according to his supporters. They blame voters'--especially the GOP's--implacable racial animus. Michael Medved with a rebuttal.
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As the Obama campaign struggles against powerful riptides of economic bad news, some of the president's most fervent apologists have returned to the old habit of blaming all his political troubles on racism.
State Sen. Louise Lucas, one of the leaders of the official "Obama Truth Team" in the crucial swing state of Virginia, told a local radio show that Mitt Romney and his supporters won't accept anyone "other than a white man in the White House." She declared that she couldn't conceive of any other reason that her fellow citizens might disapprove of the incumbent president. "All of the folks who are saying, 'We don't like Barack Obama,' they can't tell you any reason that they don't...I absolutely believe it's all about race, and for the first time in my life I've been able to convince my children finally that racism is alive and well."
On a similar note, Huffington Post editor Howard Fineman condemned the Romney campaign for exploiting racial animosity to try to undermine Obama. "He is playing to, and has from the beginning of the campaign, playing to the kind of nativist base of the Tea Party," he told the MSNBC audience of The Chris Matthews Show. "And by nativist I mean people who are in essence afraid of the world."
Together with the host, Fineman agreed with Democratic consultant Bob Shrum that the GOP couldn't cope with America's transformation into a diverse, multiethnic society. "The Republican Party has become the vessel of the resentful, of the fearful, of the people who are anxious," Shrum helpfully explained, noting with undisguised contempt that "Mitt Romney kowtows to them."
This grand theory about GOP racism conveniently ignores Romney's well-publicized flirtation with potential vice presidential picks that hardly fit the stuffy, Anglo-Saxon mold, including the African-American superstar Condoleezza Rice, the Indian-American GOP governors Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, the Latino Sen. Marco Rubio, and the Latino Republican governors Susana Martinez and Brian Sandoval. Even if Romney avoids a possible groundbreaking choice and selects a more "conventional" Republican candidate, his high-profile promotion of his party's rising non-white stars hardly shows a frightened candidate who is "kowtowing" to bigotry or narrow-mindedness.
SOURCE: The Daily Beast
Michael Medved
