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The New York Times
Opinion
The All-White
Elephant in the Room
By FRANK RICH, OP-ED
COLUMNIST, nytimes.com on the Web, May 4, 2008
BORED by those endless replays
of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for
“John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical
jive.
What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in
front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of
a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice.
The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the
blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents
“the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout
history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.
Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On
Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious
conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.
Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then
about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only
one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press
conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including
twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million
homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30
seconds, tops.
Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made
many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the
American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created
Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled
“homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”
Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He
broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air”
on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less
than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this
Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the
preacher retract it.
Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than
Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a
pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils
down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s
church.
That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of
this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought
out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive
“holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr.
McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even
after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr.
McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited
endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton.
Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he
condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his
endorsement.”
I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos
confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory.
But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s
videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s.
A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of
a theatrical black man.
Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant
prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming
home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised exchange
between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s
abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr. Wright blamed the
attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video re-emerged in the
frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he
no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to
Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.
None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right.
It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with
his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh
Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has
repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to
pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to
judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly,
sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the
same yardstick.
When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat Robertson
for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s greatest past
insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The New World
Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy theories about
“European bankers” (who just happened to be named Warburg, Schiff and
Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor was Mr. Giuliani
ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the payroll at Giuliani
Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his Long Island diocese
in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright
officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so this priest officiated at (one of) Mr.
Giuliani’s. Did you even hear about it?
There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in
too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a
glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr.
Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be,
but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In
the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single
African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in
Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice,
but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more
G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.
A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an
achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right
passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost
never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own
house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is
simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too
embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare
are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”
An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the
legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern
strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose
own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s
South Carolina primary of 2000.
This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting)
campaign and has gone so far as to criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina’s
Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current
primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his
tour of “forgotten” America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he
promised that “never again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so
grand a scale.
This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s dreams of
his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up to a point.
Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve
because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest Wall
Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag
on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans
visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr.
Bush than the recalibration of policy.
Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed an
independent commission to investigate the failed government response.
Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for “a
conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it, tear it down, you know,
whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.
For all this primary season’s obsession with the single (and declining)
demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is changing
rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The Census
Bureau announced last week that half the country’s population growth since 2000
is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the G.O.P.
Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a
white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any
coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane
Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on
race has yet to begin.
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