Will Harry Reid be the Next Victim of Political Correctness?

Poor old Harry Reid. The big news on the Sunday morning political shows concerned the fallout from what was certainly intended by Senator Reid as a private assessment of Barack Obama's chances of being elected. He said that enough Americans would vote for the then-senator Obama despite his race, because he was "light-skinned" and did not speak in a "Negro dialect." Reid's Republican opponents are calling for his scalp, saying that his remarks were "embarrassing and racially insensitive."

Now I am not a big fan of Harry's, and if I were a voter in that great western state of Nevada, I would probably be working for his opponent. But this is a bum rap. I personally do not know Senator Reid's feelings about race nor his level of "sensitivity" (whatever the heck that's supposed to mean), but this was simply a statement of fact as he saw it.

As a shrewd and seasoned politician he was sizing up how the American electorate would respond to the persona of Obama, and his judgment was that, although the first of his race to be a major party candidate for the presidency, Obama was not so exotic as to repel the average voter, and he does not come across as just a spokesman for an oppressed minority.

Americans love a certain amount of novelty, but they are not about to elect as their president somebody who appears to be very different from themselves or who speaks for just a single segment of our very diverse society. Obama, (being half Caucasian) did not look that exotic, and his speaking manner is in a mainstream, mid-western, American dialect. In other words, enough voters could feel comfortable voting for him because he was "one of us."

And Harry was right. So now he is being pilloried for saying the obvious. President Obama is light skinned. He does not speak with a Negro dialect. How could Harry have said it differently? One complaint was that he used "language appropriate to the 1950s." He did not insult anyone by using what is now euphemistically called "The 'N'-Word." The term "Negro dialect" is the appropriate and accurate term to describe a certain type of speech. Is it now the essence of political correctness to pretend that there is no such thing? Or to pretend that voters do not respond in some way to skin color, whether consciously or not? It is not "racist" nor "racially insensitive" to recognize that racial differences exist.

Harry's Republican opponents cite the case of Senator Trent Lott who was hounded, perhaps unfairly, out of his leadership position in the Senate for saying something nice about Strom Thurmond, and suggest the cases are parallel. Now I don't know Trent Lott any more than I know Harry Reid, so I cannot tell you what was in his heart when he made his speech. Maybe he was just making nice because it was old Strom's birthday party, but implicit in Lott's remarks was the suggestion that he endorsed the racial segregation for which Senator Thurmond had fought so strenuously over the years. Harry's remarks contained no such message.

As is customary today, Harry issued an immediate apology, and Obama announced his acceptance immediately thereafter. Small wonder. The President certainly didn't want to hurt the guy who is running his health care bill through the Senate. I do, however, wish Obama had struck a blow against knee-jerk political correctness by saying that "no apology was required."

Bob Martin