Of Course it's not JUST About Racism...

When debates about everything from health care to the economy are short on logic and driven in the main by ideological passion, public opinion is persuaded not just by real concerns but by less admirable, more narrowly conceived agendas.

Conservatives like to say that progressives always cry racism when anyone disagrees with the president, a manufactured talking point that is most certainly not the case. But when conservative mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh says that a white kid getting beaten up by blacks on a school bus is a product of “Obama’s America” and fails to mention that a black student intervened to restrain the attackers, his racist slant derives a kind of legitimacy among his listeners and beyond. Outrage over the incident was immediate as media coverage and You Tube converged with Limbaugh to inflame the passions of people just waiting to vent their latent racial angst over a convenient cause.

However, other aspects of the conservative mindset contort an already convoluted socio-political environment for which simple black-white explanations are insufficient. Star Parker, founder and president of the “Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education,” appeared on Saturday’s Washington Journal defined as much by her conservative, “values voters” credentials as her African-American heritage.

Hers are boilerplate conservative views - - for example, that markets correct themselves, and “market-based not government-based solutions” are best for the country. She’d be on the same page as former Fed Chairman Greenspan if he hadn’t recently revisited his thinking about free-wheeling markets. She made all the familiar Republican arguments about government getting between you and your doctor, defended Joe Wilson for addressing the issue of illegals and health care and characterized the current administration as “hard left.” She claims 30% of the black community are evangelical conservatives and decried the country’s “secular” rather than “biblical world” rejecting “homosexual marriage” and abortion as do most evangelicals of whatever color. And she suggested that attempts to equalize in some measure the distribution of wealth were tantamount to disobeying the tenth commandment not to covet what others have.

What is most disturbing about all this is the notion that religion should inform government, a contention that challenges the principles of our Constitution. But religion is very much at the heart of conservative principles, whether black or white, - - an abstraction that disrupts productive debate about education, the economy and health care. But if religious values are to infuse our daily lives it should be recalled that Christian doctrine includes caring for ‘the least of them’ as one of its most basic canons. Setting aside the habit of digging up a particular biblical passage that supports some arcane pre-conceived belief, if health-care and reasonable economic protections are not available to everyone, the term ‘values’ becomes all but meaningless.

On the one hand providing medical coverage for the uninsured may be a worthy pursuit; however, the under-insured suffer many of the same disadvantages as people who have no insurance at all. High deductibles and exclusions make for a troubled health-care landscape. Clearly, just adding a raft of new clients to the rolls of insurance companies would represent a bonanza for them without provisions that would limit the cost of premiums and co-pays and meaningful options to encourage competition. As Bob Herbert, The NY Times, 9/18/09, pointed out about the recently released Baucus plan, “The insurance industry of course, loves the Baucus plan. Need we say more?”

There are valid political differences among the president’s supporters and critics, but when race, religion and ideology intermingle, a tangle of recriminations keeps everyone confused and off-point. On Sunday The Wall Street Journal’s Steven Moore looked into the camera on Washington Journal and said he’d never seen a gun or a swastika sign at any event he attended, hmm. He also said the president should ‘stop polarizing the country and govern from the middle.’ Apparently for him, partisan rancor is really Obama’s fault. But the fact is Conservatives want to keep the president from realizing any of his goals and to pull the country back to yesterday. If polarizing the electorate and massaging the truth is what it takes to achieve that end their approach is full steam ahead.

It’s time to make the case for common sense, and work to derail the seduction of the electorate by talk-show crazies and pundits who make a mockery of free speech.