Frank Rich: Gates-gate, Sotomayor, and the Birthers

Frank Rich of The New York Times explores the racial animus on the right revealed by the Gates controversy, the Sotomayor hearings and the Birther movement.

If there was a teachable moment in this incident, it could be found in how some powerful white people well beyond Cambridge responded to it. That reaction is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments...They include Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, both of whom labeled Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Their ranks were joined last week by Glenn Beck, who on Fox News inexplicably labeled Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” presumably including his own mother...What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country’s transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.

It’s against this backdrop that 11 Republican congressmen have now signed on to a bill requiring that presidential candidates produce their birth certificates. This bizarre “birther” movement, out to prove that Obama is not a naturally born citizen, first gained notice in the summer of 2008 when it was being advanced by the author Jerome Corsi, a leader of the Swift boat assault on Kerry. That it revved up again as Gatesgate boiled over and Sotomayor sped toward Senate confirmation is not a coincidence...Obama’s election, far from alleviating paranoia in the white fringe, has only compounded it. There is no purer expression of this animus than to claim that Obama is literally not an American — or, as Sarah Palin would have it, not a “real American.” The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name.

Rich nails the theme uniting all three issues: these wealthy and powerful white men are feeling the ground shift under them as our polity becomes younger and more diverse. Their response is a collective, fact-challenged temper tantrum. David Frum pleads with his fellow conservatives to get a grip on New Majority in a recent series of posts entitled "Quit Whining!"

In this year 2009, it often seems that liberals offer policies and conservatives offer emotions. True, the liberals offer bad policies and conservatives offer understandable or anyway pardonable emotions. Rick Santelli expressed something real and true in his famous CNBC outburst...But emotional outbursts need to be the rarity, not the routine, in politics. This problem-solving country does not trust people who cannot master their feelings in the service of their goals. Ask yourself this: who was angrier in 2008? Obama or McCain? Who was angrier in 2004, Bush or Kerry? Bush or Gore? Dole or Clinton? It’s almost a rule of American politics: in any important race, the angrier candidate nearly always loses.

--Ballard Burgher