The lead story on MSNBC.com this morning was a prime example of how quick people are to loosen the reins on their racial prejudices. The Ferraro Play was a bold and deeply cynical stroke, and if this article is evidence, the game is going as planned.
Let's talk about it below.
Obama wins Mississippi; focus now on Pa.
The lede:
JACKSON, Miss. - With a six-week breather before the next primary, Hillary Rodham Clinton turned her attention to Pennsylvania and beyond to counter the latest in a string of victories by Barack Obama in Southern states with large black voting blocs.
While this is technically accurate - Obama has cleaned up in Southern states with large black populations - the last pearl on his string of victories (without qualifiers) was Wyoming. Obama 61.4%. Black population 1.01%. But I guess we're just talking about Southern states with large black voting blocks, right?
Obama won roughly 90 percent of the black vote in Mississippi on Tuesday, but only about one-quarter of the white vote. That was similar to the breakdown that helped him win South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana before losing to Clinton in Texas and Ohio, which has similar voter demographics to neighboring Pennsylvania.
Wait! I thought we were talking about Southern states with large black voting blocks! How did Texas (10.5% African American), Ohio, and Pennsyvania get in there? Is there an implication that Obama can only win Southern states with large black voting blocks? We'll set aside the falsehood of "losing to Clinton in Texas", because it does say "primaries" in the lede. Caucuses must not count in this little game. Presumably, that means we'll have to posit that Iowa, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, N. Dakota, Nebraska, Washington, Maine, Hawaii, and Wyoming don't count. That's silly of course, but it's the MSNBC/AP rules we're following.
These rules seem to say that Obama's primary wins are all about race, so Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Missouri, Utah, Washington, DC (black, but not Confederate, I guess), Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin, Democrats Abroad, and freeking Vermont are not to be mentioned, either. Rules are rules.
There is more irritating stuff in the article, most of which I'll spare you, because I don't want to run afoul of Fair Use limitations, but near the end, they say:
Blacks, who also supported Obama in overwhelming numbers in earlier primaries, accounted for roughly half the ballots cast in Mississippi...
Exit polls showed blacks accounted for a majority of the ballots in all but Louisiana, where they represented a plurality.
It takes a careful, and quite charitable, reading of this article to discern that "all" in that last sentence refers to the list way, way up at the top (no, keep scrolling up) - Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. Go read it if you don't believe me when I tell you that the plausibly deniable, but intentionally misleading construction is right out of Bush's 9-11/Iraq playbook, but with the intent of creating the impression that only black folks vote for Obama.
Now, if this were some stray sidebar about the politics of the Deep South, I would still have some quibbles about the construction of the article, but I could shrug it off. However, this was the Top Story in politics this morning, putatively reporting on the state of the contest after Tuesday's primary, and it's still on MSNBC's Politics page as I write this, as the only reportage about the Mississippi Primary (The Top Story now is Clinton's Pennsylvania Pitch: 'I'm One of You', which is a wet kiss to Clinton).
I fully expect the MSM to thumb the scales in favor of keeping the fight going, and do everything they can to ratchet up the intra-Democratic violence. That doesn't surprise me. It does surprise and disgust me that they engage in this kind of transparent race-baiting, calling up the worst of the residual Affirmative Action resentment and segregationist scapegoating that still lives on in America.
It has been amply noted that this was Ferraro's play. Now MSNBC/AP have picked it up and are openly running with it. They deserve to be punished, but writing an angry letter to the editor (or a diary on DailyKos) won't accomplish anything.
It is our duty to repudiate them by crushing them at the polls.
I would ask you to have faith that America has grown to be better than this, lead by example, and work like crazy to prove these cynical, atavistic manipulators wrong. It's the only way we'll get this kind of crap behind us.