Racial McCarthyism

Former President Jimmy Carter reiterated Wednesday that he believes racism is an issue for President Obama in trying to lead the country.

 

“When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds,” the Democrat who served from 1977-1981 told students at Emory University.

 

“I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because     he happens to be African American.

 

“It’s a racist attitude, and my hope is and my expectation is that in the future both Democratic leaders and Republican leaders will take the initiative in condemning that     kind of unprecedented attack on the president of the United States,” Carter said.

* Carter’s top campaign staffers were spotted distributing grainy photographs of [former Georgia Donk Governor Carl] Sanders arm-in-arm celebrating with two black men. Sanders was a part-owner of the Atlanta Hawks, and in the photograph he was celebrating a victory with two players who were pouring champagne over his head. Carter’s leaflet was intended to depress Sanders’s white vote.

 

* “The Carter campaign also produced a leaflet noting that Sanders had paid tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.”

 

* Carter criticized Sanders, a former governor, for preventing Alabama Governor and notorious segregationist George Wallace from speaking on Georgia state property. “I don’t think it was right for Governor Sanders to try to please a group of ultra-liberals, particularly those in Washington, when it means stifling communication with another state,” said Carter.

 

* “‘I have no trouble pitching for Wallace votes and black votes at the same time,’ Carter told a reporter. Carter also said to another reporter, ‘I can win this election without a single black vote.’”

 

* Upon receiving the endorsement of former Democratic Governor Lester Maddox, Carter responded by praising the life-long segregationist: “He has brought a standard of forthright expression and personal honesty to the governor’s office, and I hope to live up to his standard.” Maddox had not only refused to serve blacks in the restaurant he once owned, but he had also greeted civil rights protestors with a gun, and made sticks available to his white customers with which to intimidate them.

 

* “The campaign paid for radio ads for a fringe black candidate, C.B. King, in an effort to siphon black votes away from Sanders.”

 

* “Then there was the radio commercial in which Carter said he would never be the tool of any ‘bloc’ vote, slurring over the word ‘bloc’ so that it could be mistaken for ‘black.’

 

[I]f everybody’s racist, is anyone?

 

The word is being sprayed in all directions, creating a hall of mirrors that is draining the scarlet R of its meaning and its power, turning it into more of a spitball than a stigma.

 

“It gets to the point where we don’t have a word that we use to call people racist who actually are,” said John McWhorter, who studies race and language at the conservative Manhattan Institute…

 

[It's] an easy charge to make against the rare individual carrying an “Obamacare” sign depicting the president as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose.  But it’s almost impossible to prove — or refute — assertions that bias, and not raw politics, fuels opposition to Obama.

 

“You have to be very careful about going down that road. You’ve cried wolf,” said Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University professor who studies U.S. political and social         history.