A Thought

One thing that caught my attention while reading about the kerfuffle among the Republicans last week was that Rush Limbaugh over the last few months has repeatedly said that the only reason Obama was elected is because he's black. This theme is a regular one for Limbaugh -- he got fired as a football commentator for saying that Donovan McNabb received media attention only because he was a black quarterback. This of course ignored McNabb's statistics, which put him in the future-Hall-of-Famer category.

But what then came to mind was the memory of Alan Keyes. Keyes, if you don't remember, is an African-American conservative Republican who ran for president in 2000. He didn't get many votes, but he made an impression. The people who seemed most impressed were behind-the-scenes Republican leaders, because when Barack Obama, after making a big splash at the 2004 Democratic National Convention with a well-received speech, ran for the US Senate, these leaders talked Alan Keyes, who had never lived in Illinois in his life, into being Obama's Republican opponent in that campaign. It was as if they believed the same thing that Limbaugh has said: that the only reason Obama was receiving attention was because of his skin color. So the way to counter him was to find a black Republican, even if they had to go out of state to find one.

You see what's next. The two most visible faces of the national Republican party in the last few weeks have been Michael Steele, an African-American, and Bobby Jindal, an Indian-American. Neither of them, to point out the obvious, is white. It's hard to fault either of them. In this situation, Steele and Jindal are behaving the way that politicians normally behave. There is a chance to reach a larger audience, and they're taking it. That's what all politicians do, including all the other nationally known Republicans such as Mitt Romney. But Steele and Jindal were the ones selected by other Republicans, nearly all of them white, to be the public face of the party. The trend seems clear, and it reveals something about the leadership of the Republican party that indicates a sad stupidity.

They honestly agree with Limbaugh: they think that Obama's popularity is based on one factor and one factor only -- the color of his skin. So when a face is needed to present the Republican response to Obama, they look for a dark one. The fact that Michael Steele is at best a mediocre politician who has never won elective office except as someone else's running mate, or that Bobby Jindal is one of those smart people who can't deliver a speech, doesn't matter to the Republican leadership. They're non-white Republicans, and that's enough.

As a Democrat, I have no trouble with Republicans doing such a poor job of reading the electorate that they do something shallow and pointless. But as an American, I feel embarrassed that a large portion of this country has such a poor understanding of race relations that they can fall for such an obviously ridiculous idea; that they truly believe that the only reason Barack Obama is popular, the single factor that overrides all others, is that he is black. His election as this nation's first black president is cause for celebration and shows how far we have come -- the fact that his color is the only thing some people notice shows how far we have to go.