FRANK RICH: In Defense of White Americans

IT seems like a century ago now, but it was only in 2005 that a National Journal poll of Beltway insiders predicted that George Allen, then a popular Virginia senator, would be the next G.O.P. nominee for president. George who? Allen is now remembered, if at all, as a punch line. But any post-mortem of the Great Republican Collapse of 2008 must circle back to the not-so-funny thing that happened on his way to the White House.

That would be in 2006, when he capsized his own shoo-in re-election race by calling a 20-year-old Indian-American “macaca” before a white audience (and a video camera). “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen told the young Democratic campaign worker for good measure, in a precise preview of the playbook that has led John McCain and Sarah Palin to their tawdry nadir two years later.

It wasn’t just Allen’s lame racial joke or his cluelessness about 21st-century media like YouTube that made him a harbinger of the current G.O.P. fiasco. It was most of all the national vision he set forth: There are Real Americans, and there are the Others.

The Real are the small-town white folks Allen was addressing in southwestern Virginia. The Others — and their subversive fellow travelers, the Elites — are Americans like the young man who Allen maligned: a high-achieving son of immigrant parents who was born and raised in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs during its technology boom. (Allen, the self-appointed keeper of real Virginia, grew up in California...)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/opinion/26rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I hope he's right about the "reverse Bradley effect".

K/R

The South in particular has changed beyond recognition since I first lived there in 1964 as a child. There is a lot more flexibility and nuance even among bigots than you would assume.

...is chock full of bigots of varying hue. You bump into them everywhere. Everywhere.

One of them drove me to the spot where they burned the bus of the Freedom Riders near Anniston. He was proud of having participated.

He was trying to intimidate me because I was friends with a Black woman.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_546.html

On the other hand, I have met many good Christians in the South who were kind and generous people.

Historically, we Native Americans have examples of both good and bad. Even in massacres, there were white people who stood in defense or brought the issue to the public. They've helped lobby for various protections of native rights, provided legal services for free etc. We've always had friends, who might be better described as progressives.

Now, the bad ones...well they are the wingnuts.

Good analysis!

When there's about 40 million of them about to vote.

And that's just the voters.

...I also agree with Dr. Eric Dyson who said were Obama white, he would be leading by 20 points right now. Race is still a factor and if the economy hadn't just tanked in the last few weeks, you'd be seeing how much so.

would be leading by twenty in this election? I don't see it. Obama's doing about as well as an candidate I could imagine.