What penalty should Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pay for his insensitive remarks on race and the 2008 candidacy of Barack Obama?
Here’s the likely sentence: Reid’s comment praising the “light-skinned” candidate “with no Negro dialect” will linger in the news for a week and he will be flogged on all the political talk shows. He must apologize Obama and all African Americans.
The Democratic leader has already gone part way toward rehabilitation, except for one thing. His blunder gives Republicans a talking point, and they are determined to get the maximum advantage from it.
Reid deserves this uncomfortable attention. His comment was made without malice, but it strikes many as racist because of its demeaning tone. In any conversation, a Senate leader should avoid making racial observations, even when they’re intended as praise
Reid, of course, is anxious to put this uncomfortable episode behind him. “I’ve apologized to the president,” he said. “I could have used a better choice of words.”
Unfortunately, if you try and rephrase Reid’s comment about the “light-skinned” candidate “with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one,” you see the difficulty. You can’t get around Reid’s racial insensitivity.
But Republicans are wrong to compare this situation to the furor that drove former Sen. Trent Lott from the Republican leadership in 2002. When Trent Lott toasted Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on his 100th birthday, he paid public tribute to the former presidential candidate’s segregationist views. “(I)f the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years,” Lott said.
That was clear praise for segregation. Republicans recognized the problem with this attitude and forced his resignation as minority leader. Party politics and the calculations of Sen. William Frist and the Bush administration may have also had something to do with the GOP’s swift judgment.
Republicans are right to make an issue of Reid’s gaffe; he deserves to be chastized. But when the Republican party chairman and other GOP leaders seek to have him forced out as Democratic leader, they’re just playing politics.
It’s clear that the Democrats and the current administration are not after Reid’s head. The president says “the book is closed” on this episode, so it’s likely that soon enough Reid’s regrettable remark will be just a footnote.
— Questions? Comments? Contact Managing Editor Nick Cowenhoven at nickc@journaltribune.com or City Editor Kristen Schulze Muszynski at kristenm@journaltribune.com.
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