Are Media Reluctant to Discuss Race as Factor Driving Obama Opposition?
Reading coverage of Wilsongate (Hecklegate?) and other recent coverage of conservative Southern politicians, it seems that articles like "What's the Matter With South Carolina" in Politico, or the New York Times piece about how the brothel-visiting Louisiana senator David Vitter manages to remain popular in Louisiana, "Obama Factors Plays to Vitter Advantage," are ignoring what strikes me as an obvious answer to the question they raise.
Why is it that Rep. Joe Wilson, a former aide to segregationist Strom Thurmond, literally can't contain his rage, when President Obama discusses health care? Why is that South Carolina seems to be a particularly fevered hotbed of resentment/anger toward President Obama? Why is it that in Louisiana a senator like David Vitter can remain politically viable by running hard against Obama and painting an opponent as an Obama supporter? In states with high unemployment (South Carolina) and low rates of insurance coverage (Louisiana), why is there so much hostility to things like the stimulus and the expansion of health insurance? After all, when President Bush created an incredibly expensive new prescription-drug entitlement and ran up huge deficits it didn't seem to inspire outrage there.
To anyone familiar with recent—or distant—American political history the answer is obvious: race. As Thomas Schaller’s book Whistling Past Dixie demonstrated, Southern whites were driven into the arms of the Republican Party by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights, and among Southern whites racial attitude is a better predictor of how a person will vote than views on abortion or taxes.
Yet reporters go through all sorts of contortions to come up with all sorts of other reasons as to why Obama—his initiatives, his persona—cause people in these states to get extremely agitated. Is this just naiveté among the reporters covering the story, who may be too young or unsophisticated to grasp what may really lie behind the roots of anti-Obama rage in the former Confederacy? (The Times piece does note that Obama got only 14 percent of the white vote in Louisiana.) Or is there a form of political correctness at work—i.e., is there a culture at mainstream publications that discourages open talk of how politics in certain parts of the country remain poisoned by the legacy of institutionalized racism?
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Daniel Gross is one of the most widely read financial and economic writers working today. He is a senior editor at Newsweek, where he writes the "Contrary Indicator" column. He writes the twice-weekly "Moneybox" column for Slate, which also appears on Newsweek.com.
Before joining Newsweek in the spring of 2007, Mr. Gross wrote the "Economic View" column in the New York Times, was a contributing writer to New York, and contributed regularly to magazines such as Fortune and Wired. From 1998-2007, Gross served as the editor of STERNBusiness, a semi-annual academic magazine on economics and management published by the New York University Stern School of Business.
A native of East Lansing, Michigan, Mr. Gross graduated from Cornell University in 1989, with degrees in government and history, and holds an A.M. in American history from Harvard University (1991). He worked as a reporter at The New Republic and Bloomberg News, and has contributed hundreds of features, news articles, book reviews and opinion pieces to over 60 magazines and newspapers. Areas of expertise include: economic and tax policy, the links between business and politics, the rise of the investor class, the culture of Wall Street, and business history.
He is the author of four books: "Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time" (Wiley, 1996), which was a New York Times Business bestseller and a finalist for the Financial Times "Lex" award, given to the best business history book of 1996. Translations have been published in Spanish, German, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Turkish, and Japanese; "Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance" (PublicAffairs, 2000); "The Generations of Corning: The Life and Times of an American Company," co-authored with Davis Dyer, (Oxford University Press, 20010; and "Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy," (HarperCollins, May 2007).
Mr. Gross appears frequently in the media. A regular guest on CNBC, MSNBC, and National Public Radio, he has also appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Bloomberg Television, C-SPAN, BBC, and Reuters TV, and on more than 50 radio programs and talk shows.
Mr. Gross lives in Westport, Conn., with his wife and two children.
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