Don't Vote for the Black Guy!

Hillary Clinton said in USA Today a couple of weeks ago that she's winning "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans," and was rightly hammered for appealing to racial prejudice. I am therefore shocked, shocked, to find that some of the more bottom-feeding Republican pundits have embraced the racial theme wholeheartedly.

In her column last week, Kathleen Parker quoted approvingly a West Virginia voter who said he's supporting John McCain because he wants "someone who is a full-blooded American as president." The election, she says, is "about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots." Oh yes, and "there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice."

Throughout her column, she uses code words to say in no uncertain terms that only white people whose ancestors were born in America have any right to run for president, and that such Americans value our country differently than Americans of other colors or ancestral origins. It is a remarkably ugly conceit.

Of course, the phrase "full-blooded American" is utterly meaningless. As a magnet for people from all over the world, the United States is a wonderful mosaic of white, black, yellow, red and everything in between. Our children are both Asian by birth - our son came here from South Korea and our daughter from China - but they are as American as the next person, and I will tear anyone who says otherwise a new one. We teach them to be proud of their country and the ideals it represents.

Implicitly taking up the same "don't vote for the black guy" banner, Michael Medved claims in his latest column that there is something innate in "American DNA" (whatever that is) that enables Americans to take risks. And just to make sure the message gets across, he goes on:

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide - between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.

In other words, Medved is embracing the old racist stereotype of blacks as lazy, shiftless, and genetically inferior to whites. He implies that if we vote for one in November, we deserve what we get.

Parker, Medved, and the nativists to whose innate prejudice against "others" they are appealing, don't get it. They don't understand that skin color doesn't matter, but that it's what's inside that counts.

If the Republicans are really so bereft of ideas that they're actually using couched language to tell their supporters to vote McCain simply because Obama is black, then they're in deeper trouble than we thought.