Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [61]
By that point, the Republican establishment evidently concluded that the right wing had crossed the line between racism and racism, and they moved to quell the eruption, sort of. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) found Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” speech “troubling” but said that Limbaugh and Gingrich were not setting “the kind of tone that any of us want to set.”106 Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) was also “troubled” by Sotomayor’s speech, but after dogged questioning on Meet the Press finally admitted that he would prefer that Limbaugh and Gingrich not use the word racist, though he quickly added, “But people have a free right to speak and say what they want and make the analogies that they want.”107 Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was one of the only prominent Republicans to express any enthusiasm for the nomination of a Hispanic judge. He urged his party to stop “slammin’ and rammin’ ” Sotomayor.be108
In any case, the criticism had an effect, sort of. Newt Gingrich more or less apologized, and everyone else shut up—except for Rush Limbaugh, who because of a psychological condition is incapable of shutting up. Limbaugh took the opportunity to ramp up his “angry black man” attack on Obama by arguing that the nomination of a white-hating Latina was a “reflection of Barack Obama’s own racial identity, his own bigotry.” He then proceeded to tell a lurid white persecution story in which the archvillain, Obama, seeks to oppress white people, especially white Republicans:
How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama administration? By hating white people—or even saying you do, or that they’re not good or put ’em down, whatever. Make white people the new oppressed minority, and they’re going right along about it ’cause they’re shutting up. They’re moving to the back of the bus. They’re saying, “I can’t use that drinking fountain? Okay! I can’t use that restroom? Okay!” That’s the modern day Republican Party, the equivalent of the Old South: the new oppressed minority.109
The Racist Regime
A couple of months later, Limbaugh took another dip in the cesspool after Obama criticized the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in Gates’s own home. Limbaugh claimed that the comment revealed Obama’s dirty secret:
I think Obama is largely misunderstood by a lot of people. . . Let’s face it, President Obama’s black, and I think he’s got a chip on his shoulder. I think there are elements in this country he doesn’t like and he never has liked. And he’s using the power of the presidency to remake the country.110
This time, Limbaugh didn’t divulge which “elements” Obama didn’t like. But Glenn Beck did:
This president I think has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep seeded [sic] hatred for white people or the white culture . . . He has a—this guy is, I believe, a racist.111
This last comment earned Beck an advertising boycott; sixty-two companies signed on in the first month.112 Beck seemed to get the message, and he has avoided direct racism accusations against Obama ever since, dwelling instead on Obama’s marxist-fascist-potential-mass-murderer qualities.
But, for the most part, the limited reticence and self-criticism that the right has exhibited regarding race relations has only addressed the explicitness of the message, not the message itself. Rush Limbaugh touched on the crux of the matter when he said of Judge Sotomayor, “So here you have a racist. You might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist.”113 Somehow, adding the prefix “reverse” sanitizes the word “racism” to the point that mainstream Republicans feel comfortable