Was Rudy Giuliani playing a race card when he accused President Barack Obama of not loving America? No way, the former New York mayor said later, but his litmus test sounded like he needs an eye test. ADVERTISING Was Rudy
Was Rudy Giuliani playing a race card when he accused President Barack Obama of not loving America? No way, the former New York mayor said later, but his litmus test sounded like he needs an eye test.
Giuliani’s remarks last week at a New York fundraiser for Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin set off a national uproar — and became a new question for presidential hopefuls like Walker to answer: Do you think Giuliani is right or what?
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said at the event. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”
Was Giuliani playing the Foreign-Exotic-Not-Like-You-And-Me card that right-wing demagogues have so often flung at Obama?
No, Giuliani said, he was only describing the worldview that had shaped Obama’s upbringing. “Some people thought it was racist,” he told The New York Times. “I thought that was a joke, since he was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people. This isn’t racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”
If the shoe fits, goes an old saying, wear it. But in the quest for racial innocence, the “racist” label gets overused and abused so much that the old saying should be: If the shoe fits, get another shoe.
Although his statements were too disjointed to be easily analyzed, Giuliani sounded like he was saying that his remarks couldn’t be racist because Obama isn’t really all that black. After all, as Giuliani said, Obama was brought up by a white mother and other white people.
Now there’s a new definition of racism for you. Giuliani sounded like the flipside of the equally absurd-sounding proposition — argued by Spike Lee and some other African-Americans over the years — that black people can be “prejudiced” but not “racist.”
You need to have institutional power to be racist, goes that definition. But with the election of the nation’s first black or, if you prefer, mixed-race president, many quite reasonably say that’s power enough. Obama has to be held accountable to the same standards as other presidents, even as he is attacked in ways that other presidents didn’t have to face.
But Giuliani would be no less absurd to pretend that conventional definitions of racial victimization somehow exempt Obama because his mother was white. Race is partly how you see yourself and partly how others see you. If Giuliani doesn’t see Obama’s race, as I mentioned, he needs an eye test.
The race card is a little more subtle, but not much in assertion that Obama’s alleged anti-Americanism amounted to “socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.” Here he echoes the theories of conservative Dinesh D’Souza, who has made handsome profits from a book and movie that describe Obama as fundamentally influenced by Kenyan anti-colonialism.
Gee, I used to think that anti-colonial was a good thing for an American to be. I guess it depends on what you call patriotic.
Indeed, Giuliani’s most conspicuous card was the one Samuel Johnson famously called the last refuge of scoundrels, patriotism. He even challenged a reporter to find examples of Obama expressing love for his country. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler took up that challenge and found enough examples to award Giuliani’s assertions “four Pinocchios” for “whoppers” that were easily disproved.
But Giuliani, who is not running for president, did provide a revealing new litmus test for leading Republican hopefuls. Walker gave Giuliani’s remarks a pass, saying “The mayor can speak for himself.” Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida called it a mistake to question Obama’s patriotism.
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered no opinion in the first go-round of questioning. But Obama litmus tests are not going away in the contest for the Republican nomination. They’re just getting started.
Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
