From The Atlantic
by Peter Beinart
In important ways, America in recent years has become a less bigoted country. In today’s U.S. Senate, there is no equivalent to Jesse Helms, who during his 1984 reelection race filibustered a federal holiday for Martin Luther King and his 1990 reelection race aired an ad showing a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter as the narrator declared that “they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.”
In today’s Republican presidential field, there is no equivalent to Pat Buchanan, who won the 1996 New Hampshire primary after having asked, “Who speaks for the Euro-Americans who founded the U.S.A.?” and having declared that “women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism …. The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be.” Even the politicians who still wish to deny gays and lesbians equal-marriage rights now insist desperately that they harbor them no malice.
To hear some conservatives tell it, the last group against whom one can practice socially acceptable bigotry is, well, them: white, straight, native-born, right-wing Christians, against whom the federal government is waging a “silent war,” as Bobby Jindal alleges, that may lead to the “criminalization of Christianity,” as Mike Huckabee warns.
But I suspect that if a presidential candidate said, “Everything I learned about conservative white evangelicals I learned working in the pool room. I met a lot of liars, and I know they are liars,” his candidacy would abruptly end.
But last Friday, when Republican presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham said: “Everything I learned about Iranians I learned working in the pool room. I met a lot of liars, and I know Iranians are liars,” it raised few eyebrows at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. This follows Graham’s comment earlier this month that “Everything that starts with ‘Al’ in the Middle East is bad news.” (Al is the Arabic equivalent of “the”). Graham, it’s worth remembering, is running as the foreign-policy intellectual in the GOP field.
