In a cleverly concealed attack on the GOP and its conservative base as being racist, the New York Times featured an article lamenting the racial polarity that now pervades American politics. To show the great division along racial lines, the Times first notes that according to a NBC News /Wall Street Journal poll, 55% of whites dislike Obamacare while 59% of blacks approve of it; additionally, 51% of whites are against legal status for illegal residents, but 63% of blacks and 76% of Hispanics are for it.
The Times then explains recent history through its own leftist prism, saying:
Race receded from public dialogue in the mid-1990s for reasons that served both parties. Republicans grew fearful of criticism of the racially charged tactics that began with Richard M. Nixon’s “Southern strategy.” And a Democratic president — Bill Clinton — and a Republican Congress overhauled welfare, draining racial electricity from partisan combat. By 2008, Mr. Obama sought to dial back talk of race in his campaign to become America’s first black president.
Ignoring Obama’s constant attempts to infuse race into issue after issue, the Times offers its own explanation for the current racial divide, saying that two factors are the catalysts: the growing numbers of non-whites in the Democratic Party and the resentment of whites over Obama’s policies and agenda.
After the Times notes that Mitt Romney outpolled Obama mightily “in the 11 states of the Confederacy,” the Times vilifies the GOP this way:
Against that backdrop, Congressional Republicans have pursued cuts in food stamp spending, and Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted voter-identification laws. A Republican official in North Carolina recently resigned after telling a “Daily Show” interviewer that ID cards could diminish voting by “a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything.”
The Times just happens to mention that Senator Rand Paul coauthored a book with a man who wore a mask adorned with the Confederate flag. And of course the Times quotes Stanley Greenberg, a pollster for Bill Clinton and other Democrats, about what’s wrong with the GOP: “While few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities. The base thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country.”
The Times briefly flirts with a tit-for-tat comparison of representative Alan Grayson of Florida’s equating the Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan to an ally of Senator Mitch McConnell’s attack on McConnell’s GOP primary challenger for backing a candidate, “found on YouTube giving a lengthy speech in front of the third national flag of the Confederate States of America.”
But the flirtation with fairness doesn’t last long; the Times quotes Fred Steeper, a GOP pollster for the Bush presidents, criticizing the GOP for its stance on immigration, saying, “Racism may be a part of it. The Republican Party needs to stop pandering to that…The Republican Party needs to throw in the towel on the immigration issue.”
So what is the Democrats’ part in fomenting racism, you may ask? According to the Times, the Democrats aren’t racist; they have a problem “winning over whites.” The Times gallantly allows Obama the last word: “The challenge we have with the health care law is similar to the challenge we’ve had in our politics more broadly. There have been caricatures of what we’re trying to do.”
Racism is not in the eyes of the beholder, according to the New York Times. It’s in the eyes of the GOP.
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