Sometimes, a matter of months can seem like a lifetime. That’s about the length of time that elapsed since the American public were treated to a stream of homilies in the wake of the tragic shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords calling for a new political civility. The avatars of political correctness exhorted citizens and politicians to censor their discourse in the Giffords’ honor.
Someone apparently forgot to put that memo in Congressman Andre Carson’s (D-IN) inbox.
Weeks after political and media figures hurled inflammatory epithets at the Tea Party, the Indiana Democrat indulged in his own rhetorical excesses. Tea Party members, Carson averred, wanted blacks “hanging on a tree” — a statement made all the more reprehensible given that a journalist was moderating the discussion who neither challenged the Congressman nor reported his comments.
Carson’s blast constitutes one of the most egregious examples of race-baiting politics has seen in some time. And given the increasing polarization of public attitudes toward race, that says a lot.
Lest Rep. Carson be singled out for gratuitously boorish remarks, his cohorts in the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) have been putting on shows of their own. Coming off a widely publicized hearing in which she implored black voters to “unleash” black Congressmen on President Obama for his failure to tackle grinding black unemployment, California Democrat Maxine Waters said Tea Party members could “go straight to hell.”
Not to be outdone, Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson joined the pile-on by calling the movement the “enemy”. The affair prompted Allen West — the CBC’s sole Republican member and himself a Tea Party favorite — to openly mull leaving the “conscience of the Congress”.
It’s hardly coincidence that at the same time CBC members profess exasperation with the president’s policies, Reps. Wilson, Waters and Carson all tee off on the Tea Party simultaneously. The time-honored PR tradition of message coordination springs to mind. By all appearances, and in spite of Rep. Waters’ dramatic reveal in mid-August, there ’s a concerted effort underway to deflect responsibility for the nation’s mounting economic woes from President Obama while laying them at the feet of the Tea Party — a group that hasn’t even been in office for a year.The rhetorical Molotov cocktails expose the hypocrisy and circling of the wagons Democratic politicians often demonstrate, with the media’s complicity. It goes without saying that had a Republican Congressman used a Jim Crow or slavery metaphor to shame a political opponent, outraged opinion-writers across the country would have taken to their keyboards in high-dudgeon.
As one black Congressional staffer fumed to me on condition of anonymity: “Reporters all over America should be pressing the CBC and Democratic leaders, including the president, to give their opinion on Carson’s comments today. If this was a Republican who made a similar remark, you know what the media response would be.” One can only imagine.
The Tea Party has become the Boogeyman of the CBC and its ideological fellow-travelers. The concept of Tea Party racism has been trotted out so often that for their critics, the argument is tautological. Even though it’s demonstrably false.
A football metaphor here seems apropos. Carson, Wilson and Waters are running a classic misdirection: in one breath they publicly chastise the president’s policies, only to do an end-run around the White House to target his political antagonists. It’s the black political establishment’s version of a reverse gadget play seen in the NFL on any given Sunday. The imperatives of the CBC now seem identical to those of President Obama: get re-elected regardless of whether your record justifies it, all while averting blame.
As the most interventionist chief executive since President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president has been given ample opportunity to shift the country’s economic trajectory. Alas, his philosophy and strategies have been tested and found sorely wanting. Congressional black leaders are well aware of this fact, which is why they’ve staged what one acquaintance mocked as a “magical mystery jobs tour.” Rather than making the president feel the political heat, they seem to be insulating him from it.
The seeming Faustian bargain between the CBC and the White House recalls a prescient 1963 essay on racism by influential writer Ayn Rand. Even as she excoriated Southern racists, she took aim at black leaders who she accused of relinquishing their moral high-ground in exchange for influence and financial gain.
Rep. Carson’s remarks, and the longevity of many CBC members in the face of grim statistics that hinder black progress, lays bare the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the black elected class. Absurdly gerrymandered Congressional districts allow legislators to feed their constituents a steady and noxious diet of victimhood, conspiracy theories and blame-shifting. This earns them votes while preventing electoral accountability from ever being foisted upon them.
Naturally, the underlying premise of all this presumes that black voters are either not intelligent enough to figure it out, or they’ll too preoccupied with racial loyalty to ever challenge it. Sadly, the latter appears the more plausible explanation. If black voters don’t hold them to account, conditions in the community will never improve.
