When Dems play the “race card” — making an argument not directly related to race to make a policy point — the Republicans, a little sensitive about charges of racism, go apoplectic. Bush, however, has his own race card that he keeps playing when it comes to Iraq. Not surprisingly, Bush isn’t making a lot of sense.
From a Rose Garden news conference last Friday:
“There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern,” Bush said.
“I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern.”
There are a series of disturbing elements to this brief remark, each more offensive than the next.
Part of the problem is that Bush keeps playing the same race card repetitively. From his prime-time press conference a few weeks ago:
“Some of the debate really center around the fact that people don’t believe Iraq can be free; that if you’re Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can’t be self-governing and free. I strongly disagree with that.”
That’s fine, as far as it goes, but Bush can’t back up the claim. The president insists these anti-Muslim arguments are part of the “debate,” and accuses his critics of implicit bigotry, but he can’t point to anyone who’s actually levying the charge.
As the Washington Post’s Mike Allen noted Saturday:
White House press secretary Scott McClellan was peppered later with questions about what Bush meant. Bush never says who the people are who think that, and McClellan did not, either.
Oddly enough, Bush isn’t entirely wrong. He and McClellan couldn’t back up the accusation, but they could if they looked hard enough.
There are people who have been hinting at such a charge, but they’re all Bush’s conservative allies, not his liberal critics. As The New Republic’s Peter Beinart recently noted:
While Bush in his prime-time press conference virtually called people who think Muslims cannot achieve democracy racists, National Review Online this week published a piece by freelancer Steven Vincent arguing that “there is something unstable and ungovernable at the heart of Shiism–something that is not specific to Sadr’s intifada, but which in fact runs through the entire religious sect.” And more prominent conservatives have also lapsed into cultural pessimism. On “Fox News Sunday,” Brit Hume wondered “whether the Iraqi people have it within them to do what it takes to establish, participate in, and run a democracy.” On his show the next day, Bill O’Reilly raised similar questions. “The future,” he declared, “really all hinges on the Iraqis themselves. If they fight for their freedom, they’ll get it. If they support the terrorists and the religious fanatics, they’ll be enslaved again.” In other words, it’s at least possible that Iraqis want to be enslaved.
If Bush wants to attack his GOP cohorts as de facto bigots, that’s up to him, but he should be clearer about it.
Perhaps the most irritating part of this is that it’s a ridiculous distraction. Many have noted Bush’s accusation, but few have noted the context. On Friday, when Bush accused his critics of a not-so-subtle racism, he was responding to a question about increasing the number of “police and troops on the ground” in Iraq. At his recent press conference, he played the race card in response to a question about “burden sharing by allies.”
What do these questions have to do with the allegedly implicit bigotry of Bush’s critics? Nothing; that’s the point. Bush doesn’t want to talk about his dwindling “coalition” or international outrage at his policies, so he ignores the point and emphasizes a prejudice he believes exists but can’t identify.
Paul Waldman noted that this is, at a minimum, a clever rhetorical ploy.
By now this move must be almost second nature to Bush, since it is such a staple of conservative argumentation: when confronted with a substantive critique, don’t address the substance. Instead, make an argument about how others are arguing (even if you have to invent an argument no one made). When someone points out that your tax cuts benefit the wealthy, accuse them of engaging in “class warfare.” When someone points out the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, don’t say why the two are different — just say, as Bush did, “that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy.” When it is successful — and it usually is — the discussion then turns to whether or not class warfare is appropriate, or whether the troops really are hurt by analogies to Vietnam, or whether Arabs have the capacity to govern themselves. At that point, Bush has already won the argument.
And finally, there was the bizarre characterization of America as a “white” country. Look at the quote again. He’s talking about people in the world whose “skin color may not be the same as ours” and concludes that people who skins “are a different color than white can self-govern.”
I’m not sure where Bush was going with this, but the implicit message was that we (Americans) are white and can self-govern and so, too, can Iraqis, even though they’re not white.
Is Bush unaware of the fact that more than one in four Americans is not white? I wonder how a comment like this will boost the GOP outreach to minority communities…