The Race-Baiting Continues- But fortunately, it doesn't seem to be working.

http://prospect.org/article/race-baiting-continues

The Race-Baiting Continues

Paul Waldman

March 9, 2012

But fortunately, it doesn't seem to be working.


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Over at Breitbart's web site, I count eight separate pieces on Derrick Bell (who died last year), trying to make the case that he was some kind of insane radical pushing radical theories of radicalism, all with the intention of oppressing white people, which is obviously what Barack Obama is up to as well. Just to get a flavor, here's an excerpt from one of the articles:



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The message is always the same: Obama and the blacks are mad, and they're coming for you. Yet people like the Breitbart folks and Limbaugh have two problems. First, they're running out of material. There aren't any more shocking revelations to be had. The best they can do is try to make mountains of racial resentment out of the most innocuous molehills, like the fact that Obama supported Derrick Bell's effort to diversify the faculty when he was a law student. And second, by now anyone who can be convinced that Obama is a secret Black Panther never thought otherwise. The guy has been president for three years. Americans are pretty familiar with him. He hasn't actually started herding white people into concentration camps, and it's an awfully tough sell to tell people that he might any day now.

This is a version of the larger problem conservatives have as we get into the 2012 election. The argument many of them will be making, in various forms, is this: Forget about what Obama has actually done. That doesn't tell you anything. Let me tell you a story about his secret desires, his wicked thoughts, his venomous heart. That's what your decision should be based on. You hear it from media bloviators, you hear it from interest groups, like the NRA screeching that if he's re-elected Obama will outlaw guns, and you hear it from Mitt Romney, who is forever claiming that deep down Obama doesn't much love America and wants to turn it into a European-style social-welfare state. Who are you going to believe, them, me, or or your own eyes?

Watching this stuff is immensely dispiriting, I'll grant you. But it should be some consolation that it doesn't seem to be working.