{"id":14197,"date":"2008-01-10T16:16:27","date_gmt":"2008-01-10T21:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/14197.html"},"modified":"2008-01-10T16:16:27","modified_gmt":"2008-01-10T21:16:27","slug":"racial-code-words-rear-their-ugly-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/racial-code-words-rear-their-ugly-head\/","title":{"rendered":"Racial code words rear their ugly head?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been pretty familiar with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s work for quite some time, so I’m willing to extend some benefit of the doubt here, but this<\/a> was certainly a poor choice of words.<\/p>\n

A big Hillary Clinton supporter and statewide official in New York might have just given the Hillary campaign a real headache. During an appearance yesterday on talk radio \u2014 at almost the same time as Obama co-chair Jesse Jackson Jr. questioned Hillary’s tears \u2014 New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo used some words with a very troublesome racial history, apparently in reference to Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

“It’s not a TV crazed race. Frankly you can’t buy your way into it,” Cuomo said, according to Albany Times Union reporter Rick Karlin. He then added, “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference. All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because the phrase “shuck and jive” has a racial background<\/a>, Cuomo was speaking on Clinton’s behalf, and Obama is Clinton’s principal rival, the comments raised a few eyebrows.<\/p>\n

Upon closer examination, this probably wasn’t Cuomo’s intended meaning. Albany-Times reporter Rick Karlin, who first reported Cuomo’s comments, told Tim Grieve<\/a> that Cuomo’s “shuck and jive” remark was “so far removed, temporally and contextually, from any discussion of Obama,” that he didn’t hear it as a reference to Obama at all.<\/p>\n

Fine. It sounded problematic, but Cuomo doesn’t have a history of using racially-loaded language, and the transcript seems to suggest he was talking about politics in general.<\/p>\n

Karl Rove, on the other hand, is a different story.
\n
\nJosh Marshall notes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I’m probably not going to stun you by telling you that Karl Rove is using racial code words. But as long as we’re talking about Andrew Cuomo’s decision to stick his foot so far into his mouth that it’s coming out of his behind, you really must read Karl Rove’s piece<\/a> on New Hampshire in today’s Journal oped page.<\/p>\n

I’ll just pick out the highlights, but in the course of a single column Rove manages to flag Obama’s “trash talking”, “his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard”, and the alleged fact that “he is often lazy.”<\/p>\n

It’s January. Obama’s five days as frontrunner are over, at least for the moment. So you can just imagine how dirty this is going to get.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have to admit, I read Rove’s column this morning and didn’t pick up on this angle. I’m usually pretty sensitive to this, but I didn’t see it in my initial read.<\/p>\n

I did pick up on the fact that Rove and Clinton are apparently sharing talking points — Rove, for example, emphasized Obama’s “present” votes, which is a bogus attack — and the notion that Turd Blossom would call anyone<\/i> “lazy” given his work for a certain indolent president we all know struck me as spectacularly ironic, but I missed the racial overtones.<\/p>\n

Here’s the piece<\/a>. What do you think? (Not to poison the well, but I’m of the opinion that record counts. When someone with no background in racially-divisive politics makes a questionable comment, it’s easier to give him or her the benefit of the doubt. When it’s Rove, it’s far more difficult.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been pretty familiar with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s work for quite some time, so I’m willing to extend some benefit of the doubt here, but this was certainly a poor choice of words. A big Hillary Clinton supporter and statewide official in New York might have just given the Hillary campaign a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}