Just Stop
Posted on August 4th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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As some of my relatives say, for the love. Timothy Noah often excels at embarrassing himself, but he joins a select crowd of overreacting liberals with his latest item, which declares that this silly “Is Obama too skinny for his own good?” article also has a racial subtext. This is very much like the overheated response to “Celeb” or “The One”–rather than simply laughing off these ads and articles as ridiculous, Obama’s supporters and many media figures seem to be deadly serious about stressing the cunning, super-secret deployment of racial messages in both. Whether it is Perlstein hallucinating Nazi propaganda film homages or Gergen detecting racist tropes or Noah discerning skinniness as the latest one of these tropes, the responses have managed to make the various targets of their criticism seem sane, well-balanced and serious by comparison. Meanwhile, looking back over recent episodes of The Daily Show, I was amused to find that Jon Stewart and his crew had made the exact same comparison between Obama and Moses that supposedly implied (according to Gergen) that the McCain campaign was accusing Obama of not knowing his place. The response to these things is very simple: mock them for their stupidity, and stop investing them with the importance that their creators want you to give them.
Filed under: politics
Yes. But not for the reasons you state. Perlstein himself explains why liberal efforts to decode FNB (an abbreviation of untypable epithets) politics makes critics sound like “barking moonbats.” Digby has a masterful post on the whole thing here.
Exactly!
It drives me nuts that liberals, now smelling their looming ascendancy, are engaging in the kind of spiteful, counterproductive political games that led the Republicans down the long path to blatant corruption and incompetence in the first place.
Two points I’d like to add – first, the constant witch-hunt for racism is going to backlash. Obama himself has spoken about white resentment, a real and to a limited extent justified feeling. His campaign has been pretty good about skirting the line, but the rest of the left is thinking tactically instead of strategically (as usual).
Second, I’ve been watching this campaign (all sides) for months and months now, and the single seriously racist comment I have heard from any of the major players was Clinton’s Jackson comment in S.C. By hyperventillating over perceived-but-not-really-there racism now, we dilute our ability to combat genuine racism should it appear later in the campaign. By snuffling around like a pig rooting truffles and presenting every clod of dirt which might have a shred or fiber buried deep, deep within, we risk outrage-fatigue amongst the general populace when/if the right actually crosses the line, deliberately or not.
Just Stop, indeed.
What I notice about these media discussions of race is how hysterical they are. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t think the notion that the Celeb ad subtly uses race is a fantastic or crazy claim at all. It’s just that it’s subtle enough not to be overwhelming. The use of subliminal imagery is one of the arts of the propagandistic Atawater/Rove machine. Very little is left to chance for these people, but very little is stated openly either. For that reason, it’s worth mentioning these subliminal matters in any analysis of the ad, but it’s also not very useful to blow this up into some media-wide “controversy” that only lets airhead commentators hyperventilate. This is why I said before that race is unmentionable – because the meda really has no way of intelligently talking about race, they either ignore it or flog it like a dead horse. They can’t seem to discuss race the way they would every other factor in this election – as a clear emotional issue that does affect people’s voting judgment, and that is going to be manipulated accordingly like anything else. But the media can’t treat it like anything else, because they have no comfort level with the matter. Unlike most people, I might add, who certainly are comfortable with various levels and shades of racism, and can’t stand the media’s ineptness in speaking about the matter, which is part of what accounts for the backlash.