Race and SC: Tucker Carlson speaks for us all (and JEDE)

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Tucker Carlson, smarmy Republican mouth-piece and the stupidest man in cable news (except maybe Glen Beck) has become a tireless champion for the truth.

As he so insightfully put it, "The Clintons are running a below-the-radar racial campaign against Barack Obama. It's obvious. How else could anyone explain his losing half of his white support in a week? Nothing has happened recently to change the campaign... no other explanation could possibly account for that."

First off, what are we accounting for, exactly?

Obama does indeed seem to have lost a lot of white support in SC, and all those votes went to Hilla... oh, actually they are going to John Edwards.

Let's look at the latest polling to see how Hillary has divided South Carolina. We've got Edwards 40% among white voters and 4% among AA voters... no division there. Edwards has united white people. And Senator Obama is at 10% among white voters and 59% among black voters. Again, no sign of division. Obama has clearly unified the black community.

But Hillary's polling numbers tell the tale. She attracts 36% of the white vote and 25% of the black vote. Her polarizing nature has torn the State apart so badly that she's the only candidate who attracts strong support from all races. That's no accident... the Clinton campaign actually planned this. Their racial strategy is so fiendishly obsessed with race that it attracts voters from ALL races! Now, I've seen racially tinged campaigns that appeal to white voters, and I've seen racially tinged campaigns that appeal to black voters, but this thing of openly seeking the votes of everyone, regardless of color, is a new low in American politics.

It think I've established that Edwards doing better is an artifact of Clintonian racism, because nothing else has happened in the last week or two that could possibly account for Edwards doing better in SC. Except perhaps that for the last week or two John Edwards has been campaigning in South Carolina, the only State he won in 2004. A white male native son who won the 2004 primary and was the party's VP nominee in the last election spends some time campaigning in SC, and is universally acclaimed as the winner in the SC debate, and then rises in the polls. A sure sign of Clintonian malignancy at work.

Many commentators have followed Tucker Carlson's brave lead, suggesting that the Clintons have painted Barack Obama as "the black candidate." And who could doubt that? One thing about South Carolina we can all agree on is that it's a color-blind State. Much like Stephen Colbert (himself from SC), South Carolinians don't usually have any idea what race a person is unless someone flies in from New York to tell them.

The fact that the news in South Carolina all week has been entirely about Barack Obama's big lead in the State, explained in terms of his tremendous support among black South Carolinians, couldn't be relevant. Too obvious. Though the national news and local news have focused obsessively all week on Barack's role as "the black candidate," we know that South Carolinians are too sophisticated to take anything from that kind of saturation news coverage. People in SC rely on subtler cues, like a man in his sixties going on three hours sleep a night briefly dozing off during a speech on Martin Luther King day.

Let's see... has anything else happened in South Carolina this week that could cause racial polarization? Well, do you know what a Republican primary race in the deep south looks like? For the last week anti-McCain and pro-Huckabee stooges in Confederate uniforms have been on TV marching around SC waving Confederate flags... but there's nothing racially polarizing in that. And the Republicans brought their "Mexicans are coming to rape your daughters" road-show to town, but there's nothing racially polarizing about that.

I'll tell you what's racially polarizing... when Hillary Clinton sinks to the lowest, most desperate racial campaign tactic we've ever seen: Suggesting that her black opponent likes Ronald Reagan. The dog-whistle is playing its Satanic tune, hearkening back to the days when African-Americans were greeted in the streets of Charleston with hisses of, "Reagan-lover!" And, adding insult to injury, Bill Clinton trotted out the racist stereotype that black candidates just aren't consistently anti-war. Who can forget when anti-war heroes George Wallace and his running mate Curtis LeMay criss-crossed the nation in 1968, insinuating that African-Americans secretly approved of the war in Vietnam.

Hmmm... is there anything ELSE that could account for shifting polls? Tucker Carlson tells us that nothing potentially campaign-changing has happened this week, and I'm sure he's right, but there was that one tiny thing when the President of the United States went on TV and announced that the economy was near to collapse, and that he was demanding that the government send every non-rich person $600 in hopes of averting catastrophe.

But an admission from the economy's #1 cheerleader that we are all doomed to live under bridges in refrigerator boxes isn't something that could change a campaign dynamic. And God knows bad economic news couldn't redound to Hillary's benefit... nobody associates "Clinton" with good economic times.

Yes, all in all I would have to say Tucker Carlson had it just right. And we should all applaud his intellectual integrity of bringing these facts (well, actually wholly unsupported insinuations, but that's pretty much the same thing) to our attention, despite how much it must have wounded Tucker to say anything bad about his hero Hillary Clinton.

[OHdem10]

1. Tucker is the last person I would believe. His Clinton Hatred

blinds his thinking.

[ellacott]

2. I rarely agree with Tucker but he's right on this

There will be a backlash but people are choosing to think this is not true.

[Rock_Garden]

3. That's the first time I've ever heard anyone on DU call Tucker a tireless champion for the truth.