Carter calls Obama's opponents 'racist', but I'm not so sure
In a TV interview last night Jimmy Carter, the former American president, suggested that opposition to Barack Obama’s contentious policies is often “based on racism”.
Carter, a respected Democrat and US president from 1977 to 1981, told NBC News that he thinks “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man”. President Obama has faced intense criticism over his plans for healthcare reform, and Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina, heckled the president during his speech to Congress last week, shouting “You Lie!”
Whether there was a racist motivation behind Wilson’s outburst is unclear. While both Republicans and Democrats have condemned heckling the president, most agree that it was mistaken rather than malicious. One South Carolina politician said Wilson had “no filter between his brain and his mouth”. No stranger to accusations of racism, Wilson is believed to support flying the Confederate flag, an ancient symbol of pro-slavery and segregationist groups, in southern states like his own, but his son was quick to assure journalists that Wilson “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body”.
Obviously Jimmy Carter suspects something more than rudeness in the criticism of Obama’s plans. And it’s true, there is something malicious in much of the opposition to the president’s healthcare bill, which would establish a nationwide health insurance programme for American citizens. Some of the anti-Obama lobbying has been profoundly offensive, like the campaigners who distributed posters of the president with a Hitler moustache and asked Congressman Barney Frank why he supported a “Nazi” policy. It’s hard to imagine previous presidents getting the same sort of treatment from town hall dissidents.
But then, it’s hard to imagine previous presidents doing what Obama has done with the healthcare bill. Bill Clinton has tried to reform American healthcare before, in 1993, but that attempt was shot down by a Republican-dominated congress. This time, Barack Obama’s wider-reaching bill is being debated by a congress with a Democrat majority, not to mention the fact that it follows an election where healthcare reform was one of the top three issues of concern for voters. The state healthcare sceptics are more militant than they’ve ever been before, but couldn’t that be because this time Obama has a golden opportunity to make it happen?
I’m not convinced racism has all that much to do with it. Remember a year ago, when millions celebrated the fact that America was finally ready to elect a black man to the highest public office? Remember how we lamented Britain’s inability to put people from ethnic minorities in positions of power? Obama was meant to be a post-racial politician, after all. Certainly, he’s been given some harsh and often unjustified treatment by his critics, but he’s never suffered large-scale abuse on the grounds of his race. When he was elected, there was no Ku Klux Klan revival, no outpouring of racist sentiment; all the fears of assassination attempts came to absolutely nothing. Even in the secrecy of the voting booth, the backlash against Obama from distrusting white voters spectacularly failed to materialise, as he scored a dominant victory over John McCain.
I have a lot of time for Jimmy Carter but I think his insight has rather missed the point here. American conservatives don’t dislike Obama because he’s black; in fact, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, whose parents were immigrants from India, looks a good bet to be Republicans’ next presidential candidate. Conservatives dislike Obama because his ideas are different, and are arguably threatening to their own. But more importantly, they dislike him because people are taking those ideas more seriously than ever.
photo courtesy of A Aliferis @ flickr
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