By Jeffrey Page

It is 2012. We’re supposed to have advanced over the last 100 years. We’re supposed to be smarter, maybe even more compassionate. Workers are supposed to be better off. Management is supposed to be more enlightened. But I’m sitting here looking at The Times’s account of two clothing factory fires in Pakistan and the deaths of 300 workers, young people for the most part between 18 and 25.

I read, and reread, a line in the Times story – “Officials said panicked workers [of a garment factory] were trapped inside the multistory building, which had just one exit” – and something sounds familiar. The calamitous Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 in downtown Manhattan was in a multistory building with one fire escape, two stairwells and lots of locked doors. The loss in the Triangle fire was 146, mostly young women who had immigrated from Italy and Eastern Europe to find a better life.

I keep reading and learn that that the garment factory in Karachi had 1,500 workers and one exit. Additionally, management had installed grills to stop employees from leaving through windows. The bosses didn’t approve of people going home before the end of their shifts.

And I think about the fearless Clara Lemlich and the feckless Mitt Romney.

Lemlich was a garment worker and union organizer who led a strike in New York in 1909 over working conditions and who declared at a meeting of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, “I have listened to all the speakers. I have no further patience for talk, as I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move we go on a general strike.”

For her courage and for the fact that the bosses’ hatred of her was matched by the adoration of thousands of clothing workers, Lemlich was attacked by thugs hired by management. Later she was blacklisted from work in the industry. Despite serious physical injury – she was just 5 feet tall but the lead attacker made sure to bring some help – and the difficulty in finding work, Lemlich never quit. She lived to the age of 97 and, as reported by the great Jim Dwyer of the Times, in her final years helped organized the workers in her nursing home.

And then there is Romney and another nice bowl of Pablum he serves up for anyone who will listen. Recently he uttered the standard right wing line about labor unions: “Over the years, unions have made extraordinarily important contributions to American society.” Which of course is not the whole story.

Labor didn’t make those contributions. Rather, Labor won those contributions, sometimes through calm, peaceful negotiations and at other times through the use of Labor’s only real weapon: the strike. As a result, in some cases, windows were unlocked, doors were allowed to swing open and shut. Workers could get out. Salaries went up. Medical insurance was offered.

“But today, the effects of unionization have changed in ways that need to be recognized,” Romney says at a campaign website. “Too often, unions drive up costs and introduce rigidities that harm competitiveness and frustrate innovation.” And he goes on to make the lame argument that union officials don’t care about anything except staying in business. As if to say that workers are the stooges of their union leaders.

What Mitt Romney, and others like him who had to struggle along on an income of $22 million last year, refuse to accept is that every time a union has won a concession for its members, there were two parties at the bargaining table. This is not complicated unless you don’t wish to understand.

If Romney can cite an example of Labor’s holding a gun to the poor oppressed skull of management, I will retract the following observation: Mitt Romney knows as much about the work life of ordinary people as another famous millionaire, Scrooge McDuck.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

If I want to avoid the truth I could be brazen and tell you No when the truth is Yes.

Or, I could dance the old soft shoe and hope you don’t suddenly realize you’re being duped.

Or, like Mitt Romney, I could just immerse you in delusional blather. Romney is great with blather.

His sentimental acceptance speech was designed to make us think of him as just an ordinary humble guy, that is, an ordinary humble guy with a 2011 income of $22 million. To do so, he employed one of the more unfortunate metaphors you’re likely to hear. “The soles of Neil Armstrong’s boots on the moon made permanent impressions on our souls…. ” he said, and then, with gooey ordinary humble-guy sincerity, he played the Armstrong card a few more times.

“Tonight that American flag is still there on the moon,” Romney said, not bothering to explain how he knew this or what this factoid was doing in a partisan political speech. “And I don’t doubt for a second that Neil Armstrong’s spirit is still with us…. ”

Question: Was that the unsubtle Romney’s elusive attempt to suggest, with the grace of a Ringling Bros. elephant stepping into a bucket, that the late Neil Armstrong was – or had been – on board the Romney bandwagon?

Question: Was it just me, or did you also hear that little catch in Romney’s throat? You know: that mawkish gasp he uses on special occasions, such as when he’s trying to connect himself to an American hero or when he’s talking about Little League and the need for Americans to find more time so they can coach their kids’ soccer teams.

More time for soccer? Is Romney of this Earth? Soccer, when many of us are striving to meet the mortgage payment or go out on interview after interview trying to land a job? Does Mitt Romney have any understanding of what’s going on out here? And, by the way, could he please identify the soccer team he coached.

He jabbers about “when your son or daughter calls from college to talk about which job offer they should take…. And you try not to choke up when you hear that the one they like is not far from home.”

Which job to take? Doesn’t Romney understand that young people with degrees in their pockets are not choosing between one job close to Mom and Dad and one job on another coast? Instead, they’re scrounging for whatever job they can find to put some money in their pockets and to start their living their lives. And many, instead of getting an entry position with a corporation or a law firm, are slinging burgers and living with Mom and Dad, whom they dearly love and who they’d like to get away from – ASAP.

Romney exhales heavily when “we see that new business opening up downtown. It’s when we go off to work in the morning and see everybody else on the block doing the same.” I’ve been wondering: Precisely which “block” does Romney live on?

But back to Neil Armstrong.

Blathering ever onward, Romney said Armstrong’s spirit embodies “that unique blend of optimism, humility and the utter confidence that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.” Well, not if you’re talking about other big stuff such as the development of penicillin, the invention of the movable-type printing press, the formulation of aspirin, the use of paper money and the invention of the stethoscope. All done by people who were not Americans.

Maybe Neil Armstrong would have signed on to the Romney campaign. But he never signed and we’ll never know.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

For some reason unknown to me now or then, The Times Herald-Record sent me to Kansas City to cover the Republican National Convention of 1976. I wasn’t much of a political reporter, but the editors were interested in feature stories about local delegates and party leaders.

And off I went to the heartland.

The 1976 convention was exciting. After all, here was Gerald Ford, a man who was appointed vice president after Spiro Agnew had to resign and who then became president when Richard Nixon quit. And here was Ronald Reagan mounting a serious challenge to Ford, the never-elected incumbent. And here was Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina carping that Reagan’s vice presidential choice, Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, wasn’t conservative enough. There was talk of William F. Buckley’s mounting a challenge to Schweiker.

And finally, with Ford’s nomination, there was Reagan’s concession speech in which he paraphrased St. Matthew and referred to America as “a shining city on a hill.” It was that single line in that single speech that brought the house down and which would identify Reagan for the rest of his life. Conservatives fell in love with him after being out in the cold since the Goldwater rebellion of 1964.

Now in Kansas City, the GOP made news, I wrote features. And then Republicans seemed to come this-close to nominating me for president of the United States.

I think it was the second night of the convention. I was in the press tent a few hundred yards from the Kemper Arena, where the convention’s public business was conducted. The Kemper was a huge venue, holding about 20,000 people. I had been on the phone with an editor in Middletown and missed the last bus over to the arena. With my credentials dangling from my neck I hoofed it to the Kemper.

I was drenched with perspiration – Kansas City is not pleasant in summer – and I looked like I’d had a bad night at McNulty’s Saloon. I found an open door and walked in. If there were security guards on duty that night, they were practicing the art of invisibility.

So now I was in the arena but wasn’t sure of how to get to the press area, which I knew was not far from the rostrum, where speeches were delivered, promises were made, Jimmy Carter was dismissed, and where Reagan would come close to snatching the nomination from Ford.

I walked the perimeter of the arena and finally came to an inclined corridor leading to arena itself. I walked up the stairs and just as I reached the third or fourth step from the top, all the lights in the Kemper Arena went out. I couldn’t see a thing. The darkness didn’t stop the delegates. They just kept cheering, yelling, whistling and applauding. A voice on the PA system was saying something but I couldn’t make it out.

From across the arena a single spotlight shone up and down and side to side, like it was searching for something. Then it landed on me and stopped and 20,000 people in the Kemper started cheering even louder. I mean cheering with passion. The band played some music; I forget what it was.

I began feeling a little panicky in just that one light and with everybody cheering me. The sweat rolled down my face and chest. My shirt was soaked. I looked like hell. And still they cheered. Then I did what I knew might seem like a joke; I looked behind me, thinking the person they were expecting would be there. Or that security guards were finally arriving to drag me off to jail. But they never showed up.

So I did what had to be done.

I waved.

Nothing big. Not like Eisenhower used to do with both arms up, but just a modest little wrist shake to acknowledge the delegates’ worshipful feelings toward me. I thought about the old Frank Capra movie “Meet John Doe,” and wondered about an unknown (me) assuming leadership of a major political party. Of course Doe had to do it by threatening to commit suicide; I was not ready for that.

I would like to tell you that I also thought about who I would pick for my running mate and what I would deal with in my first 100 days, but I had no such thoughts. I simply stood there, dumbstruck and not having a clue about what to do next.

I waved again. The house lights came on and I understood what had happened. In a major breach of security, I had walked up a corridor to the point on the circumference of the arena where friends, family members and guests of Republican VIPs were seated.

They weren’t cheering me. They were cheering Betty Ford, who had been introduced by the guy in the PA system and was being seated at the moment I climbed those stairs.

Betty waved. The delegates forgot me and responded to her. They loved Betty Ford. Didn’t we all?

But I was severely annoyed. This meant that no matter what happened on Election Day, I wouldn’t be able to appoint John Lennon as my secretary of state.

By Jeffrey Page

This is a certainty. Rep. Todd Akin, who is 65, knows less about human reproduction than a precocious 12-year old. His explanation of the relationship between rape and pregnancy is right out of the Dark Ages.

“It seems to be,” he said, “first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down,” he said.

As a result of Akin’s bizarre reference to “legitimate rape” – is that the kind where you ask permission? – the Republican Establishment, such as it is, called for him to withdraw from the Senate race in Missouri. But he promptly told Mitt Romney, Karl Rove and Senator Scott Brown, (R-Mass.) and others to go to hell. In the incumbent, Democrat Claire McCaskill, Akin sees easy pickings and nothing like a little ignorance on pregnancy is going to knock him out of the campaign.

Quit the race? When a day after his idiotic remark, Akin apologized but made sure to inform listeners to Mike Huckabee’s radio program that he was running by the grace of you know who? Romney and other critics must be nuts.

So that’s how it stands.

Except that when you ignorantly dismiss an issue affecting half the American population, there are questions you are required to answer.

Congressman Akin:

–How “really rare” is it for a woman who has been raped to get pregnant? You attribute this to some doctors. Identify them.

—How many doctors told you that such pregnancies are really rare? Was it more than two?

–What were their sources? Police records? FBI crime statistics? Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Oh, wait. These agencies don’t differentiate between legitimate rape and illegitimate rape, so what information did you examine? You did actually see this information, didn’t you?

–What precisely is a “legitimate rape?” How does a legitimate rape differ from an illegitimate rape? Has anyone else ever used the word “legitimate” to describe a rape? Or are you breaking new ground?

–Do you have any idea of what you’re talking about when you say that a woman’s body “has ways to try to shut the whole thing down”? What are those ways?

–In your apology you said your comment was ill-conceived and wrong, and that you apologize. But you also said, “I used the wrong words in the wrong way.” Please elaborate. And please give an example of how someone could use the wrong words in the right way.

–Please explain why your initial statement and subsequent apology appear on your campaign web site, but not on your Congressional site?

Todd Akin, who is old enough to qualify for Medicare, is the father of six children. You’d think by this time he would know a little something about sex.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

A late note on Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, who is an idiot. Of this there can be no doubt. It was Reid, after all, the supposedly distinguished gentleman from Nevada, who said Barack Obama has “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” That was not in the Stone Age of American politics, but just two years ago. He also chided Obama for his different vocal inflections when speaking before the NAACP and less formal gatherings.

“Negro dialect?” In 2010? (Reid also noted for anyone who cared to listen, that Obama was a “light-skinned” black person.

And now, along comes Harry Reid jumping into the fray over whether Mitt Romney has paid any income tax for the last decade or so. He has not, Reid said. He asserted this on the floor of the Senate, where members can’t be sued for what they say. Someone who worked at Romney’s Bain Capital slipped Reid this juicy bit of information, he said. But alas, it was a confidential tip so Harry was unable to reveal the source’s identity.

And there it hangs: The belief that Romney paid no taxes. Clearly, Reid accomplished what he set out to do.

Meanwhile, some of Romney’s defenders don’t sound very helpful when they go into attack mode against Reid.

First up was Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who called Reid “a dirty liar” on national TV.

There are problems with Priebus’s logic. If Romney’s tax affairs are Romney’s business and no one else’s, as he and his allies insist, how could Priebus conclude that Reid was lying? He never backed up his “dirty liar” assertion by saying Romney showed him his 1040s. I think Priebus knows as much about Romney’s taxes as I do. Which is nothing at all.

Then there was Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. discussing Reid on television: “I think he’s lying about his statement of knowing something about Romney. I think he has created an issue here. I think he’s making things up.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Romney and his relationship with the Internal Revenue Service. Graham thinks Reid is lying, thinks Reid has created an issue, thinks Reid is making things up. If you’re waiting for Graham to say something for certain, let me know when it comes. In the meantime, his use of think needs a little work. Because if I say I think he’s a dolt it means I can’t be sure.

Interesting part of this contretemps is that, unless I’m seriously mistaken, that was about the extent of the defense of Mitt and his tax habits. The Messrs. Paul, Gingrich, Perry, Cain, Huntsman, Pawlenty, Santorum, and Ms. Bachmann, all of whom had plenty to say (mostly negative) about Romney before he crushed them, have been uncharacteristically silent in their presumed outrage over Reid’s charge against their presumed nominee.

Finally there was Romney himself. In a campaign stop in Nevada, he declared: “Let me also say categorically: I have paid taxes every year. A lot of taxes. A lot of taxes.”

So have I, so have I, Mitt. So has everybody else in this country. We pay sales tax, county tax, village tax, school tax, gasoline tax, and, oh yes, federal and state income taxes.

Here are the questions that apparently will not be answered and thus will not go away. Which taxes do you pay, Mitt? A lot, you say? What’s a lot, Mitt? How much in flat dollars? And how much as a percentage of your adjusted gross income?

Obama’s man David Axelrod put it plainly: Mitt Romney ought to take 10 seconds and release his tax returns. “Why don’t they just put it to rest?” Axlerod said. “What is it that he is hiding?”

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

I never met Jim Farrell, the district attorney of Sullivan County, but he’s now on my imaginary list of people I’d like to have over for dinner along with Jackie Robinson, Clarence Darrow, Shakespeare. You know what I mean. Farrell, for no other reason than he seems to be one of those rare public officials who refuses to mince words.

My admiration came to light this week when I read about Farrell’s reaction to a judge’s remarks as he sentenced a man Farrell had prosecuted. County Judge Frank LaBuda reasoned that if you’re two years shy of the legal drinking age, and if you nevertheless drink to the point where your blood alcohol level is 50 percent higher than the statutory limit, and if you smash your car into a tree, you somehow become “a hero” for getting two passengers out of the burning wreckage even if you’ve killed your third passenger who, it turned out, was your cousin.

LaBuda noted that driving drunk was “a mistake” on the motorist’s part. Now, I can understand the defendant’s family rallying around him with this dubious argument about “mistakes” and “heroes.” I might offer it myself in a similar circumstance. But the judge?

Charles Wolff, 19, had pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter and driving while under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, the Times Herald-Record reported. On the night of the crash, his blood alcohol level was 0.12 percent.

(The legal limit in all states is 0.08 percent, but this doesn’t indicate sobriety. Imagine you weigh 180 pounds and you drink four bloody Marys in one hour, and the world starts spinning out of control and you’re having a little trouble remaining vertical. Guess what. Your blood alcohol level would be 0.08 percent, according to a BAL calculator – www.ou.edu/oupd/bac.htm – offered by the University of Oklahoma.)

It was sentencing day for Wolff, and some of the pleas LaBuda heard could be expected. They were the words people use to describe their kin in the hope of getting a dose of mercy from a judge.

“He is a good kid,” said the father of the cousin who died. The father of one of the injured friends also asked for a sentence of probation and no jail time. So did the other injured friend.

Then Judge LaBuda described Wolff as “a hero” for having rescued his two friends from the crash. He declined the family’s requests for a strictly probationary sentence, and, having the option of sending Wolff away for seven years, sent him to the county jail for six months.

“Even a hero who makes mistakes, there must be accountability for our actions,” said LaBuda, according to a story in the Times Herald-Record. “There must be incarceration when life is lost.”

Farrell was having none of it.

“I would certainly take issue with the judge’s definition of [Wolff] as ‘a hero.’ He is not a hero,” Farrell said. “He caused the death of his cousin.”

One of these days, society is going to take drunken driving seriously. It will begin with an understanding that forgetting to pay a parking ticket is a mistake. Driving drunk into a tree and killing your cousin is a felony.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

The next time some Second Amendment zealots say they can’t understand what’s so strange (or dangerous) about someone like James Holmes possessing an M-16 semiautomatic rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, and a couple of .40 caliber semiautomatic handguns, please say a prayer for Veronica Moser.

No need for a formal entreaty, just a please-God reminder that Veronica walked among us for a while, that she had a great smile, that sometimes she liked to wear a pink boa and heart shaped earrings, that she was shown in one picture doing what people her age often must do (trying to rescue the dregs of her ice cream from a cone leaning at a precarious angle), that she was one of the 12 people Holmes murdered in his assault in Aurora, Col.

She was 6 years old. We should remember that as well.

In the months to come, there also will be people offering explanations for Holmes’s felonies and will use his troubled state as an argument against capital punishment.

When that happens, could everyone – people on both sides of the issues of capital punishment and gun control – remind themselves not only of Veronica, but of her mother, Ashley Moser, 25, who Holmes shot into critical condition with bullet wounds to her neck and to her abdominal area, where her unborn child resides.

Additionally, the next time a James Holmes strikes, could someone please read the following list out loud: Fayetteville, Ark., 2; Santee, Calif., 2; Tucson, Ariz., 4.; Florham Park, N.J., 2; Red Lake, Minn., 8; Nickel Mines, Pa., 6; Blacksburg, Va., 32; DeKalb, Ill., 6; Cambridge, Mass., 1; Fort Hood, Texas, 13; Huntsville., Ala, 3; Oakland, Calif., 7.

Those are just 12 of the approximately 75 public shootings that have occurred in the United States during the first 12 years of this new millennium. In the dozen listed we lost 86 of our friends, relatives, and neighbors. There were many more in the 2000s and in decades previous.

Say a prayer. If you don’t know a prayer, just spend a minute remembering them and others we have lost to lunatics with guns.

As for Holmes. Doubtless in the months to come, we will be deluged with explanations for him, the kind of “clarification” we have grown accustomed to over the years, and which some of us are no longer buying. Chances are someone will tell us Holmes had an unhappy childhood, or that he was bullied at school, or that he had a drug dependency, or that he was sexually abused as a child, or that he didn’t get along with his father, or that he didn’t get along with his mother, or that he was paranoid, or that he feared the world, or that he was a loner, or that his girlfriend left him.

Lots of excuses.

Fine, but let us never forget that in addition to walking into that movie house with guns, James Holmes attacked Veronica, and Ashley and all the others out for a midnight movie, with gas (he had a mask) before firing, and that, previously, he had booby trapped his apartment in order to kill as many cops and neighbors as possible. Do I really have to listen to someone tell me how troubled poor James Holmes is?

Doubtless some of these tales about Holmes will be coupled with pleas to Colorado officials to forego seeking a death sentence and go for life imprisonment because it is the more humane thing to do. Must the test of our humanity involve the way we dispose of James Holmes?

A life sentence would mean that if Holmes lives to the age of 80, Colorado taxpayers, possibly including Ashley Moser, would have to shell out enough money to feed him about 61,320 meals. They would pay for his medical care. They would pay for his dental care. They would pay for his clothing. They would pay for everything in his life.

How does society benefit by keeping Holmes alive? Does it demonstrate its humanity? Does it show us as a better people? Not if Holmes is in jail and Ashley Moser has to visit her daughter’s grave. And not when you come to grips with his wish to murder far more people than were in the theater.

I spent most of my life opposed to capital punishment. In most cases, I think I still am, though I accept that anti-death penalty absolutists will disagree. Whatever remains of my humanity is shaken by the likes of the Sons of Sam, the Timothy McVeighs, the Dylan Klebolds and the Eric Harrises. And James Holmes.

Do I, yet again, have to prove my decency by standing for the right of James Holmes to live? I don’t think so. Would society’s decision not to put him to death make the world a better place? I don’t think so.

I hope they serve Holmes whatever he wants for his last meal, and I hope dessert is an ice cream cone.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Ed Gillespie is one of those Republican “strategists” – the Democrats have them, too – who seem to materialize in presidential election years and who are interviewed by TV and print reporters so they can spin issues in favor of their candidates.

They’re also called upon to clean up the mess their candidates occasionally create. Such was Gillespie’s appearance recently in The Further Adventures of Mitt Romney and l’Affaire Bain.

At its core, the issue is this: Romney says he left Bain Capital early in 1999, but government documents filed by Bain in 2002 have him listed as president, CEO, and chairman. How could this be?

Actually, Gillespie said with a straight face, Romney retired “retroactively” from Bain. Neat trick, and you’re left wondering how someone could utter those words without snickering. Gillespie is good; he doesn’t snicker when he says things like that. But you could not be blamed if your first thought after hearing Gillespie’s line is of the famous politician who, when asked a certain question before the grand jury, said: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

Would that I could do things retroactively. I could enter high school retroactively and pay attention in class retroactively, read my assignments retroactively, make a decent average for myself retroactively and head off to Princeton retroactively. It, uh, didn’t happen that way.

Retroactively I could be a kinder person. But I and 300 million Americans understand this. Mitt Romney does not.

Here are some people who would benefit from retroactivity:

–The governor of Maine, Paul LePage, could go back several weeks and choose not to compare the Internal Revenue Service to the Gestapo. (This is the same Governor LePage – no relation – who once described the NAACP as a “special interest group” that could “kiss [his] butt” if it objected to his refusal to attend the organization’s state convention.)

“Do you have a sense of what the Gestapo did during World War II?” a reporter from Politico asked LePage.

“Yeah, they killed a lot of people.”

“And the IRS is headed in that direction?”

“Yeah,” LePage said.

“Are you serious?”

“I’m very serious,” LePage said. Later he said, “I’m saying the federal government is taking away the freedom of Americans to make choices.”

Later the governor issued one of those completely meaningless conditional apologies. You know what I mean. “I apologize to Jewish Americans if they feel offended,” LePage said.

“If” they feel offended. For LePage, it’s an unanswered question.

LePage should have met my Uncle Harry, who spent several years in a Nazi forced labor camp in the Pyrenees. With Harry, there was no “if.”

–Nan Hayworth could retroactively rethink her idiotic postcard on which she thanks me for having participated in her telephone town hall. The fact is I wasn’t there.

She could take a minute to understand the silliness of her salutation – “Dear Neighbor” – since we are not neighbors. Not only do we live in separate towns, but in separate counties that are divided by the Hudson.

Note to Mitt: You can’t retroactively retire just as you can’t retroactively kill your Massachusetts health care system on which the Obama plan is based. You supported it as governor. Do you think anyone is going to buy the line that you retroactively think it’s a bad plan?

Or will people recognize your retroactive this-and-that for what it is: Another example of your saying anything – anything – to get elected.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Emily Theroux

Barack Obama

The night America celebrated the election of the first African-American president in history, no one really imagined what Barack Obama’s opponents – the ones who took his victory as an affront to truth, justice, and the American way – were capable of.

For many Republicans, the sting of defeat and the political imperative of surrendering the executive branch to another “Democrat” administration were reason enough to begin scheming in earnest to regain power. For others, however, the collective recoil of the right from Obama’s election signified something more visceral. The mere fact of the new president’s race was an affront that people inclined to mistrust or malign minorities couldn’t abide.

Obama the first black president would soon live with the first black family in “the people’s house” – the American version of a palace, whose occupants had always resembled the now-ebbing white majority. The ugly legacy of racial animus bubbled up from hibernation, to remain just beneath the surface of the national dialogue.

By 2010, it had coalesced into an obsessive goal – not for all conservatives, certainly, but for the white supremacists in their midst. Of utmost importance to both the biased politicians who wouldn’t come right out and say it and the very vocal portion of the populace who would: getting the black guy out of the White House (only the racist signs and posters and websites didn’t couch that sentiment in such bland terms, with all the banality of evil even the milder words convey).

Reince Priebus

As Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC, demagogued the issue’s urgency the other day in apparent racial code that would have done Scarlett O’Hara proud: “We have to put an end to this Barack Obama presidency before it puts an end to ‘our way of life’.” (That expression, once widely employed in the antebellum South, is a paradigm of dog-whistle politics: It’s too high-pitched for human ears, but them good-ole-boy redbone coonhounds can hear it a mile away.)

Beck calls Obama a racist, and the floodgates open

Glenn Beck, the zookeeper at Wingnut World, played the “reverse racism” card against Obama early on, inexplicably calling a biracial man raised by his white mother and grandparents “a racist” with “a deep-seated hatred of white people and the white culture.” The right seized on it, venting their post-election fury by attacking a succession of black “proxies” for the then-Illinois senator who dared to attempt “running for president while black” – and soundly beat them.

Andrew Breitbart

First, congressmen and talk-show hosts scapegoated ACORN, sabotaging an organization devoted primarily to registering minority voters. Later, far-right bloggers targeted Van Jones, the president’s “Green Jobs” czar, and smeared Shirley Sherrod, an employee of the Department of Agriculture whose remarks about helping a white farmer were distorted by “creative” videotape editing to make her look like a racist.

The attack dogs’ fearless leader, Drudge Report protege Andrew Breitbart, purportedly “died of hostility” (as Robert Wright of The Atlantic suggested) on March 1 at the age of 43, yet was survived by a cadre of fanatic “Breitbots” dedicated to carrying out his mission here on earth.

‘White-balling’ (reverse racism) vs. the media

Currently in the Breitbart scandal machine’s sights are members of the mainstream media or progressive blogosphere who dare to venture into “white-balling” territory. (That’s what I call the mythic “blackballing of white people” that the right wing calls 21st-century “reverse racism,” otherwise defined as any utterance, however non-judgmental, that causes white people to imagine that black people could possibly blame them or their ancestors in some way for Dred Scott, “whites only” water fountains, high-rise public housing projects, stop-and-frisk, Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, America’s 70 percent non-white prison population, voter ID, or racial slurs, about the very worst of which – according to “Chris,” author of  the incisive and funny blog, “Stuff Black People Hate” – doofy white guys named Chad in too-tight pink polo shirts will ask you why, if black people can say the most awful word in the English language, they can’t.)

Joe Williams

The story of how the Breitbart bloggers brought down Joe Williams – the first black editor to be hired by the DC print/online enterprise Politico, in the wake of its confrontation by the National Association of Black Journalists because of a noticeable dearth of diversity in its newsroom – is instructive.

Joe Williams, according to Politico’s website, is “a veteran political journalist and telegenic analyst” whose credentials include a 1996 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a solid 28-year career in newspaper reporting and editing, magazine writing, and newsroom management. As deputy chief of the Boston Globe’s Washington Bureau, he covered the 2008 presidential campaign and Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Politico hired him in June 2010 as deputy White House editor but, less than a year later, reassigned him to a reporter’s job – that of White House correspondent, “specializing in the intersection of race and politics,” according to Tracie Powell of the Poynter Institute.

The move (which Powell didn’t characterize as a demotion) gave Williams an opportunity to develop his broadcast skills while providing Politico with onscreen “proof ” of its diversity – yet his editor’s job went to a white female editor who still holds the position, so Politico’s management ranks are once again no more racially diverse than they were before Williams was hired.

“They said they wanted me as a reporter, which would get me closer to the action so that I could describe some of the things I would talk about on TV with more authority,” Williams told Powell. “They said I was good at it.” Williams’ supervisors also pointed him in the direction of cable news programs, many of which express a viewpoint, so Politico’s honchos can’t say they expected a correspondent stationed at the vortex of race and politics, during an election year this volatile, to appear on cable opinion shows and then clam up on the subject of race.

Romney ‘very, very comfortable’ with people like him

Joe Williams was indeed good at his job. I watched him frequently on cable news programs like Martin Bashir’s afternoon talk show on MSNBC, and Williams was thoughtful, knowledgeable about the presidential race, and insightful about the issues. Then one day in June, he appeared on Bashir’s program, gave a candid answer to a simple question, and returned to the office to find his life turned inside out.

Mitt Romney

Bashir had asked him why he thought Mitt Romney appeared so often on Fox News while avoiding network TV and other cable stations. “Romney is very, very comfortable, it seems, with people who are like him,” Williams replied. “That’s one of the reasons why he seems so stiff and awkward in town hall settings, why he can’t relate to people other than that. But when he comes on ‘Fox and Friends,’ they’re like him. They’re white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company.”

When Williams mentioned people who aren’t like Romney, he was referring to class differences (between Romney and white, conservative town hall attendees, or waitresses at a diner he visited, or the “hoi-polloi” in plastic rain ponchos at a NASCAR event), not racial differences. But by that time, it didn’t make any difference. Sharp ears at The Washington Free Beacon and Breitbart.com pricked up when Joe Williams said “white folks,” and that seemingly innocuous expression was all they needed to hear. The “Reverse Racism Police” were off in their squad cars, sirens blaring, to bag another hapless suspect.

The bloggers blogged their inevitable tale of Joe Williams’ racist smear against Mitt Romney and perfidy against Politico, throwing in a few “raunchy” tweets they came across while trawling through the reporter’s virtual baggage. They dug up dirt about his personal life. And sure enough, they scored a bulls-eye: before the week was out, Politico had suspended its most conspicuous “diversity” hire.

Except for the fact that Joe Williams is not an employment statistic, a demographic profile, a notch in someone’s belt, or an object lesson in the pitfalls of political coverage. He’s a human being, not a scalp taken by vicious partisans with an ideology to flog.

Next week: Part II, “Reverse Racism and False Equivalency”

By Jeffrey Page

Certain decisions by people with loads of money and monumental pretensions cry out for comment. The same goes for decisions by news editors.

In the Styles section of The Sunday Times just past, we were offered a story about the wedding of a couple in Santa Barbara. He is 30. She is 29 and comes from a rich family; her father was executive producer and co-creator of some popular TV shows.

The reporter gave us 29 breathless and fairly vacuous paragraphs about how the happy couple met (through friends out for a drink), and how the woman found the man acceptable even though he wore a fanny pack (“I knew when his fanny pack didn’t bother me that this was the real thing”), and the fact that she is stylish and he once had worked on the Harvard Lampoon, and that their feelings for each other got warmer during his absence on a previously planned vacation.

Packed into those 29 paragraphs were 1,586 words of which 27 were: “It is not guaranteed but if a stylish woman forgives her date for wearing a fanny pack, all that follows can be pretty much considered a breeze.” This wedding story contained about double the number of words in a typical column by the great Maureen Dowd one of whose recent pieces contained 889 words of which 37 were: “Standing a few feet away from Jerry Sandusky, as he laughed and reminisced with friends in the front row of the courtroom, made me want to take a shower. Just not in the Penn State locker room.”

One of the two pictures accompanying the wedding story showed the newlyweds playing skeeball on two alleys, a little something the bride’s parents had installed when they redesigned their barn so it could be used for what Dad called “the cocktail part of the party.” They also moved a half-acre of earth to create a hill. They felt they needed a hill so the guests would have, in the reporter’s words, “stunning water views during the ceremony.”

The story reported that the bride had consulted “the family psychic” about whether the man was right for her and that the soothsayer’s response was “You know that you know that he’s the one,” which sounds suspiciously non-committal on the seer’s part.

The story took up two-thirds of the page. I know about story placement. I know that a wedding story, unless it’s William and Kate, doesn’t go on Page 1 and that a story about children dying violently doesn’t go in Styles. Some news that got short shrift on the day of the story of the wedding with the ocean view demand attention because their treatment made The Times look foolish.

–That same Sunday edition contained a 466-word story about two Lebanese people killed by shells fired from Syrian territory. One of the victims was a boy in the village of al-Hisheh. He was 8. His father and four siblings were injured. A woman was killed when a shell landed in her home.

–Officials in Myanmar freed 20 people whom they’d seized en route to a major demonstration with political overtones. This was told in 328 words.

–In New York, the police reported that six people had been slain in the last few days. In one case, a woman bludgeoned her son to death. He was 9. A man was shot to death in Bay Ridge with a bullet in his neck. He was 65. The other four dead were in the Bronx and Queens. The Times gave it 632 words.

That’s three life-and-death stories, not one of which involved building a hill so wedding guests could see the water.

page@zestoforange.com