John Fout
You sit down to read the paper in the morning. Are you more likely to read an article about how a Hillary Clinton surrogate played the race card or an article about how mandates could affect health insurance costs?
The media have decided you will read the story on race. So they create headlines and stories to feed the media beast and their profits, rather than report on real issues. The most recent "race-baiting" incident involved former 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter, who said this about Barack Obama:"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman -- of any color -- he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."Micky Kaus believes Ferraro merely stated the truth. There's no doubt that Obama has been hailed as the post-racial candidate who can overcome the racial divide. One only has to read articles by Andrew Sullivan or Mary Mitchell to see Obama played up in this role. Why is he post-racial? It's not because he is white. It's because he has an African father and a Caucasian mother. This truth is self-evident. Obama has not run on being post-racial, but the media has made him the post-racial champion anyway. Does anyone seriously believe Ferraro is a racist? Nope. She has fought against discrimination and for equality her entire career. She was one of only two women to graduate in her class at Fordham Law School. Ferraro recognizes she was chosen as a vice presidential candidate because she's female. It was a historic choice. Many better-known candidates were rejected, including Gary Hart, Tom Bradley and Lloyd Bentsen. Ferraro -- and Clinton by proxy -- did not suggest Obama's success stemmed from a lack of ability. On the contrary, she merely recognized the reality of the media building up Obama, which has been shown in several media studies (here and here ) on his positive coverage. Nevertheless, the media cynically claimed she played up the idea of special treatment in the hopes of an affirmative action backlash with low-income white voters. The media outrage over Ferraro's comment reached a level of absurdity the other night. Keith Olbermann, anchor of MSNBC's Countdown, offered a nine-minute diatribe on Clinton's campaign exploiting race. Olbermann accused the Clinton campaign of using "the vocabulary of David Duke." Duke, of course, was formerly a grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. Oh, the hyperbole. The KKK also came up in a New York Times op-ed by Orlando Patterson, who claims Clinton's "3 a.m." ad has racial overtones. The ad shows several children and a mother sleeping safely and asks who you want answering the phone and protecting your children if there is an emergency somewhere in the world at 3 a.m. The author acknowledges that the ad draws upon another one that surfaced during the Mondale campaign in 1984. Yet Patterson expresses concern that if your children are in danger, many people will assume it might be from black men lurking in the bushes. He claims it has allusions to a famous racist epic film by D.W. Griffith's "Birth of Nation" that helped revive the KKK. Thus, the ad has some secret racist subtext, Patterson says.
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