Mugged (42 page)

The word “the” made the racist hit parade when Donald Trump said he had a “great relationship with
the
blacks.” Ditto with basketball references—also from Trump, after he advised Obama to get off the basketball court and deal with high oil prices. (Obama does play basketball a lot. Trump wasn’t inventing that.)

But the main proof of racism was any criticism of Obama. The media’s racism diving rod brought back all the worst elements of society that flourished before the OJ verdict.

THE MCCAIN PALIN CAMPAIGN AD

The Associated Press reported that Sarah Palin’s description of Obama “palling around with terrorists carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.”
¹
If AP read the news, it would know that Palin was referring to Bill Ayers, the white, privileged, upper middle class member of the Weather Underground who bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol.

When the McCain campaign ran a surprisingly effective commercial in 2008, that was called racist, too. The ad, titled “Celeb,” began with clips of crowds ecstatically cheering Obama, followed by photos of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, as the narrator called Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world.” Then, the music turned ominous, and the narrator listed Obama’s high-tax policies and opposition to offshore drilling, before saying that this was “the real Obama.”

It must have taken hours to come up with something racist about that ad, but Jonathan Alter and Keith Olbermann set their minds to it and finally found it:

Wait—who said “uppity,” again? Did any Republican call Obama uppity? No. Did the ad call Obama uppity? No. Alter said “uppity.”
It’s about Obama’s uppitiness. That much we know. Is that racist? That’s for the public to decide. I remain neutral.

The ad had nothing to do with Obama being uppity. It was nearly the opposite, comparing him to lightweight celebrities.

CBS News’s Katie Couric referred to the “Celeb” ad as “infamous,” and reporter Dean Reynolds said McCain’s new tone in the ad “appears to conflict with some of his more high-minded talk of the need for civility on the stump.”
³

NOT VOTING FOR OBAMA

Throughout the 2008 campaign, liberals sagely informed us that America would never make a black man president. In a cast of thousands,
Slate
magazine’s Jacob Weisberg said that only if Obama won the election would children in America be able to “grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives.” But if he lost, Weisberg continued, “our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to.”

Why weren’t liberals worried about what children would think if Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination had been defeated? No, no—only electing the most liberal person ever to seek the presidency on a major party ticket would prove that the country could “put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.”
⁴

And guess what? Weisberg was right! Obama won and we haven’t heard another peep about racism.

Not only did Obama win, he got 43 percent of the white vote—the
highest of any Democrat running for president in a two-man race since 1976. Still, liberals detected racism. Immediately after whites had been mau-maued into electing the most left-wing president in U.S. history to prove they weren’t racists,
Slate
’s Tim Noah was consternated that white people hadn’t given a
majority
of their votes to the black candidate. The fact that McCain received 53 percent of the white vote, Noah said, was “a hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon that warrants greater attention.”
⁵

The white vote for McCain, Noah said, proved that whites couldn’t forgive Democrats for abolishing Jim Crow. Which the Democrats didn’t abolish. Which Democrats created and preserved. And which Republicans abolished over the ferocious objections of a bunch of Democrats.

Meanwhile 96 percent of blacks voted for Obama after careful attention to the issues without any notice of race.
⁶
But Noah didn’t think that black people’s one-party vote was “a hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon that warrants greater attention.”

Then, in 2012—which happened to be a presidential election year—the
New York Times
was again promoting the theory that a vote against Obama was prima facie proof of racism.

The
Times
published the results of a “racism” study by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz that first looked for the areas of the country with the most searches for racist words and jokes on Google, and then—after excluding searches originating from Jonathan Alter and Keith Olbermann’s apartments—compared the vote for Kerry and Obama in Wheeling, West Virginia (the seventh most “racist” city), to the vote in Denver, Colorado (the fourth most enlightened city).
⁷

John Kerry won about 50 percent of the vote in both cities in 2004, but, four years later, while Denver voted for Obama by 57 percent, Wheeling gave Obama only 48 percent of its votes.

First of all, why are we not supposed to conclude that 7 percent of white people in Denver harbor such racist prejudices that they believed the only way to cleanse themselves was to vote for the first black president? Why else vote for Obama when you didn’t vote for Kerry? Was Kerry too arrogant for them?

Second, it is simply assumed, at places like the
Times
, that only one dimension was at play in the 2008 election: Obama’s race. Isn’t this the sort of simplistic thinking normally associated with red-state voters?

The Stephens-Davidowitz study failed to consider, for example, the fact that Obama was the most fabulous, celebrity-backed candidate for president
in recent memory. That sort of thing probably matters more to people in Denver than in West Virginia.

Not only that, but on November 2, 2008, two days before the election, Obama vowed to bankrupt the coal industry. He had actually unleashed that bombshell in an interview with the
San Francisco Chronicle
much earlier in the year, but the tape was only revealed to the public days before the election.

Obama had told the Chronicle that under his “aggressive” cap and trade plan “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

Although the
New York Times
neglected to mention Obama’s plan to bankrupt the coal industry, the tape was played many times on Fox News,
⁸
it was all over the Internet
⁹
and covered heavily in West Virginia newspapers.
¹⁰

Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz probably wouldn’t know this, but West Virginia’s economy is extremely dependent on coal, providing 99 percent of the energy and 60 percent of all business taxes in the state. The average West Virginian is as well informed about the coal industry as the typical
New York Times
reporter is about the president’s position on gay marriage.

The real way to test Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz’s theory about West Virginians would be to run a nonflashy black candidate who had not pledged to destroy the coal industry and then compare votes.

Be that as it may, wishing to replicate Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz’s experiment and bolster his results, I have compared different states’ participation in the military, an institution with a high degree of racial mixing, to determine the most racist states. The surest evidence of a person’s level of racial tolerance isn’t a joke search, but his willingness to live in close quarters with people of other races. Residing cheek-by-jowl with black people in military barracks would be hell for racists!

Here are the study’s results: The least racist states were Montana, Texas, Wyoming, Alabama, Alaska and Idaho, and the most racist were Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.
¹¹
The most racist areas of the country are Marin County, closely followed by New York City and Malibu. Of course, we can’t tell the race of those joining the military from these areas (Marin County: 0.0 percent black), but nor can we tell the race of those searching for racist jokes in Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz’s study.

The
New York Times
had told me the opposite was true—that West Virginians
were so racist they would happily vote for a white person who promised to destroy to coal industry, but not a black one!

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