Conservative David Frum wonders why oh why conservative stalwarts like Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, and Forbes magazine would be trying to stir up the conservative base with something as unexpected as - horrors! - racebaiting:
With the Forbes story and now the Gingrich endorsement, the argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner – and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien – has been absorbed almost to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010.
Rush Limbaugh has been claiming for almost 2 years that President Obama is bent upon "redistribution" and "reparations." Following D’Souza, Gingrich has now stepped up to suggest that this redistribution is motivated by anti-white racial revenge. If Obama wants to expand health coverage, tighten bank regulation, and create government make-work projects it’s not because he shares the same general outlook on the world as Walter Mondale or Ted Kennedy or so many other liberals, living and dead, all of them white and northern European. No, Obama wants to do what he does because he thinks like an African, and not just any kind of African but (in D’Souza’s phrase) "a Luo tribesman."...
Frum tries to put this latest rhetorical clownshow down to Gingrich's need to insulate himself from the tea partiers for his previous "liberal" working across the aisle on healthcare and education reform and support for S-Chip and TARP if he decides to run in 2012.
But even so, a major point still troubles him:
Why do Forbes (which presumably has many choices of cover material) and Gingrich imagine that such a message will resonate with their conservative audience? Nothing more offends conservatives than liberal accusations of racial animus. Yet here is racial animus, unconcealed and unapologetic, and it is seized by savvy editors and an ambitious politician as just the material to please a conservative audience.
Why, indeed? I'm racking my brain here. What reason could they possibly have? Really, it's so very very puzzling...