got around to discussing race. Yet, predictably, fourth-tier 2016 GOP presidential wannabe Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s governor, instantly made an ass of himself, calling her comments “remarkably divisive,” which takes a lot of chutzpah, coming from a racial panderer who just three years ago pledged he would sign a “birther” bill if it reached his desk.
Jindal also claimed that “the people of Louisiana are willing to give everyone a fair hearing,” a claim belied by that PPP poll, and that certainly didn’t apply to Jindal’s own exclusive focusing on Landrieu’s tertiary reference to race. Nor does it comport with the tenacity of birtherism, which has only grown more intense, the more thoroughly it’s been discredited.
Birtherism, you see, has become the GOP’s more widespread manifestation of racial codespeak in the Obama era. Although Obama deftly quieted the elite media trolls with the release of his long-form birth certificate just after Donald Trump had ridden birther hysteria to the top of the GOP primary field in April 2011, the GOP base was never really dissuaded. In fact, nine months later, in January 2012, a YouGov poll found that more Republicans than ever questioned Obama’s citizenship. Those denying his American birth outright were up 50 percent, from 25 percent of all Republicans to 37 percent, while those accepting his American birth were down 10 percent, from 30 percent to 27 percent of all Republicans. Indisputable hard evidence did nothing at all to dissipate the birther delusion, it only made it stronger. That’s not something Mary Landrieu made up. The GOP’s own partisan media did that.
Although birtherism is a complex phenomenon in its own right, Landrieu — like Bush before her — was referencing a much broader problem facing Obama, as well as herself, and the Democratic Party as a whole. You’re not supposed to call it “racism,” because racism means KKK mobs in hoods, and police siccing snarling dogs on young children, and we’re not like that anymore — see, we’ve got armored vehicles and sound cannons now!
But 40 years of data from the General Social Survey — the gold standard of American public opinion research — say otherwise. They tell us that Southern whites overwhelmingly blame blacks for their lower economic status, ignoring or denying the role played by discrimination, past and present, in all its various forms, and that the balance of Southern white attitudes has barely changed at all in 40 years. At the same time, attitudes outside the white South have shifted somewhat — but still tend to blame blacks more than white society, steadfastly ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary — such as 60 years of unemployment data, over which time “the unemployment rate for blacks has averaged about 2.2 times that for whites,” as noted by Pew Research. It is only Democrats outside the white South who have dramatically shifted away from blaming blacks over this period of time, and the tension this has created within the Democratic Party goes to the very heart of the political challenge both Obama and Landrieu face — a challenge that is not going to simply go away any time soon.