Obama, racism and Jimmy Carter

ANALYSIS

By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff

updated 5:10 p.m. ET Sept. 17, 2009

WASHINGTON - We’ve seen this play before.

Democrat accuses Republicans of racism. Republicans fire back. Democrats retreat.

So it went Wednesday, when former President Jimmy Carter, 84, fingered racism for fueling the hysterical tone of many of President Obama’s critics.

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,” Carter told NBC News.

Republicans called Carter’s remarks “very destructive” (Newt Gingrich) or “an outrage” (GOP chairman Michael Steele, who happens to be black himself).

But otherwise party leaders stifled themselves, apparently on the principle that you don’t get in the way of an opponent when he’s shooting himself in the foot.

Meanwhile, it took the White House about six seconds to disassociate itself from Carter, whose pro-Palestinian views have also annoyed many Democrats.

Ironically, the shoe was on the other foot nearly 30 years ago, when Carter was running for reelection against Ronald Reagan.

In August 1980, the Republican challenger’s team chose Philadelphia, Miss., to launch their campaign.

The only noteworthy thing that had happened in Philadelphia up until then was the murder of three civil rights workers on June 21, 1964.

And the incident was not a distant memory. The FBI’s investigation was still open.

“Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day,” New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recalled a few years ago. And Reagan served up the red meat, telling the hooting, hollering crowd of 10,000 white Mississippians at the Neshoba County Fair, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Those were code words for white supremacy so thinly veiled as to be transparent.

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The Reagan speech was the application of what was euphemistically dubbed the Republicans’ “Southern strategy” to crack the Democrats’ 120-year-long hold on America south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Carter aide Andrew Young, himself a former civil rights worker (and future mayor of Atlanta), would have none of it.

He called out Reagan’s camp.

“If he had gone to Biloxi, and talked about state’s rights, if he had gone to New Orleans, or Birmingham, I would not have gotten upset,” Young told the press.

“But when you go to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were killed — murdered — by the sheriff and the deputy sheriff and a government posse protecting state’s rights, and you go down there and start talking about state’s rights, that looks like a code word to me that it’s going to be all right to kill niggers when he’s President.”

The Reagan campaign reacted with mock outrage: You calling us racists?

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