Thank You, Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson did the whole country a service last week. By calling President Obama a liar at a formal joint session of Congress, and in front of millions of viewers, he provided the clearest possible evidence for what Obama had just said, that his opponents had created a “partisan spectacle” by employing “scare tactics” in order “to score short-term political points.” He decried the low level of political discussion that has been employed by Republican leaders and elected officials. While most congressional Republicans sat on their hands and scowled at his criticism, Wilson demonstrated its truth for the world to see and hear. Congressional historians are digging into their files to find out exactly how historic Wilson’s interjection was, but so far nobody can remember such an occurrence in Congress.

Wilson’s crudeness stands only one step beyond the concerted Republican campaign against Obama’s legitimacy to govern. One might argue that being called a liar is preferable to having your opponents claim you would advocate “pulling the plug on Grandma,” as many prominent Republicans in Congress have said about Obama. The effort to convince the American public that Obama’s plan includes “death panels”, which would push seniors into their graves, places our President in a league with mass murderers. This was taken to ridiculous lengths by a Republican National Committee “survey” which implied that the Democrats’ health care plan would deny medical treatment to Republicans. This was so silly that the RNC had to withdraw this language, but the implication is not funny: that Obama and the Democrats might be so murderous and vile that they would try to kill off Republicans.

This is the context for Wilson’s behavior, not an error, but merely an extension of the more general campaign to discredit Obama, Democrats, and the majority of American voters who voted for him. The red-baiting tactics that Republicans used so frequently in the 1950s and 1960s have been revived. But the subtext of Wilson’s eruption in the House is more sinister. In 2003 Wilson, a protegé of Strom Thurmond, criticized Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the daughter of the Thurmond family’s African-American maid, when she revealed that Thurmond was the father of her child. For Wilson this linkage of his “hero” with a black woman was “unseemly.” How much more unseemly that his President should be black.

The hope that the election of Obama might mean a page had been turned in the history of race relations in America has proven horribly wrong: just as they have for decades, the Republican southern strategy continues to use latent white racism to gain political leverage. A July opinion poll by Research 2000 showed that doubts about Obama’s Presidential legitimacy were concentrated among Southern whites, three-quarters of whom doubted the official account of Obama's birthplace.

Wilson made his infamous remark when Obama had just said that “prominent politicians” had told lies about the content of his health care proposals, notably the fiction about “death panels.” Wilson’s repeated claim that the Democratic plan would give coverage to illegal immigrants is itself a lie, one that has been repeatedly disproved by reference to the section of the House proposal that says, “Nothing in this subtitle shall allow federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully in the United States.” In fact, even legal immigrants would get only limited coverage. Wilson wants more efforts to insure that this provision is enforced than the Democrats favor, but that is a far different and much more technical matter.

Wilson has embarrassed Republican leaders, because he embodies the inevitable results of their dishonest campaign of lies and fear, directed not merely at health care reform, but targeted more directly at President Obama. When elected officials and national political leaders determine that they are going to bring down the recently elected President with every means at their disposal, we, the public, must gather our forces. The self-proclaimed patriots don’t like the nation’s democratic choices. They say they are defending American values, but in fact they are attacking Americans.