New Republic
By Brian Beutler
January 14, 2016
This
says so much.Greg Sargent of the Washington Post catches House Speaker
Paul Ryan saying something extremely revealing about President Obama’s
decision to inveigh
against Donald Trump’s bigotry in his State of the Union address.
It
sort of degrades the presidency to then talk about primary politics in
the other party, during primaries. That’s not what presidents ought to
be talking about in State
of the Union addresses.
At
a narrow but crucial level, Ryan’s admitting obliquely that the party
depends on white nationalists for its survival and appealing to their
sensibilities creates problems—something
most Republicans deny. The party’s discomfiture with Trump’s campaign
is in many ways an expression of the view that Trump takes rhetoric too
far, or jeopardizes the White House, not that Trump is unacceptably
xenophobic. Ryan’s at least acknowledging there’s
trouble here.
But
from a higher elevation, it says a lot about how Republicans view
racism in general: not as an issue that demands mass condemnation, but
as something to be managed
more quietly. Ryan isn’t blind to the issue, but as a political and
ideological matter he can only see so far. He’d have a point if Obama
had, say, tried to elevate Jeb Bush over Marco Rubio for partisan gain.
But when a politician recruits millions of followers
with bigotry, it isn’t just a GOP housekeeping problem: It’s a matter
of national urgency.
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