The Reid Remarks

Over the weekend, Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and the New York Times’ “Caucus” blog obtained early copies of Game Change, and posted around 15 or so “juicy” items. I read the posts, and figured the most attention would be paid to the revelation that Sarah Palin didn’t know why North and South Korea were different countries and thought that Saddam was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Among the Democratic tidbits, I figured the highest-profile items involved Ted Kennedy’s anger at Bill Clinton (the former President suggested that a few years ago, Barack Obama would have been serving coffee to the two of them) and the demonstration that the campaign images of both of the Edwardses, not just the former senator, were totally fraudulent.

Instead, of course, nearly all attention has been paid to Harry Reid’s statement about Obama’s electability given his light skin and lack of a “Negro dialect.” Reid’s remark could be deemed a “Kinsley gaffe,” in that he said something basically true but politically stupid. As Ambinder pointed out, no one would have paid any attention to the comment if Game Change authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin had simply summarized Reid’s sentiments with this kind of sentence: “Reid believed that America was ready for a black president, and it didn't hurt that Obama was lighter-skinned, or that he talked like a Harvard law professor.”

It’s not hard to imagine a context in which Reid’s statement would be morally damning—if, for instance, he was explaining why he had supported Obama over, say, a darker-skinned or less eloquent African-American candidate. But, of course, Reid was explaining why he believed this particular black candidate—in a race with no other black candidates, and in a country that had never before nominated a black presidential candidate, much less elected a black president—would be electable. In the panoply of controversial remarks by congressional leaders over the course of American history, I’d be hard pressed to put Reid’s statement in the top hundred. The reaction to the statement says much more about the toxic political culture in which we now live than it does about Reid.

First, American political culture is now a culture of deception, in which political figures from both sides of the aisle (although in recent years, this conduct seems to have been more extreme among Republicans than Democrats) say things they know are untrue in the hopes of scoring political points. The Republican demands that Reid resign for his “racist” comments (coming from people like Michael Steele or Liz Cheney) fall into this category; so too do the more mainstream claims from Republican members of Congress that Reid’s comments resemble those of former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who said the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had won the 1948 presidential election.

The lengths to which some have stretched to deem Reid’s comments “racist” boggles the mind. For instance, the prominent blogger Ann Althouse: “Is Harry Reid a racist? It depends on what the meaning of racist is: If by ‘racist,’ you mean somebody who feels antagonism toward black people, then Harry Reid isn’t a racist. Harry Reid thinks we are racists. If by ‘racist’ you mean somebody who would use other people’s feelings about race in a purely instrumental way to amass political power, then Harry Reid is a racist.”

As Eugene Volokh countered:

My question: Does the term “racist” indeed normally mean “somebody who would use other people’s feelings about race in a purely instrumental way to amass political power”? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used this way; and while I certainly recognize that words can have multiple standard meanings, I’m skeptical that the second meaning Prof. Althouse suggests is indeed standard. And if I’m right about this, then it seems to me a bad idea to try to redefine “racist” this way, because of the substantial possibility that (1) listeners will misunderstand, and (2) will misunderstand in a way that is unfair to Sen. Reid, because it might lead listeners to think that Reid is actually being called a definition-one racist (a normal meaning of “racist”), since that’s a more standard definition.

And could anyone seriously believe that comments explaining why one majority leader thought a black man was electable in 2008 could be compared to comments from another majority leader explaining why the country would have been better off if the segregationist candidate had won the 1948 election? Obviously the Republican members of Congress who have made the comparison don’t actually believe it. That they could nonetheless offer it with a straight face says something about the nature of contemporary political discourse.

Second, the Reid remarks say something about the relationship between the press and political figures. In a persuasively argued post, Ambinder suggests that Reid’s comments to the two authors were made off-the-record (that is, not for direct quotation). That neither author will publicly reveal the ground rules for their interview with Reid doesn’t help their case.

Reid was almost certainly finished politically before this book was published. But if, in fact, he does lose in November, doubtless the book will be cited as one of the reasons for his defeat. That would be unfortunate.