Posted on 09/07/2001 10:48:24 PM PDT by VinnyTex
Among the most tiresome Beltway journalists, whose columns I can only read while popping Tums, is Washington news interpreter David Broder. Both the media and the US government textbook long used in our college courses, by Morris Fiorina and Paul Peterson, praise this figure as a "reflective journalist" and "the dean of American political commentators" committed to "a strong two-party system" as the basis of constitutional democracy.
Supposedly Broder stands above partisanship while blessing real political debate as the lifeblood of our society. He is different, or so we are told, from run-of-the-mill journalists who front for a particular party or ideology, perhaps in the way that a good constitutional monarch points his subjects toward principled behavior without stooping to partisan rancor.
Unfortunately there is nothing in Broder’s behavior, other than his self-importance to which others cater, that would suggest such a role. He is every bit as predictably liberal in his opinions as Eleanor Clift. Molly Ivins, or Al Hunt, and in February 1993 he raged in several columns against Clinton for not pushing the gay agenda in the military harder than he did. His most recent sanctimonious outburst was directed (in an August 30 syndicated column) at Jesse Helms, who is about to retire from the Senate and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In remarks on "the last white racist senator," Broder beats up on Helms for not being the kind of inclusive politician who is good for our system. It seems that Helms is a "white racist," (I suppose) in contrast to what David Horowitz calls "black race pimps," who has failed to grow. Unlike another Southern Republican elder, Strom Thurmond, who now votes with liberals on race issues, Helms has continued to "pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans."
Although Helms, as Robert Novak correctly states in a September 1 column, has a staff full of blacks and enjoys the esteem of black politicians with whom he has worked, he committed two mortal sins for which Broder as the high priest of democracy will never excuse him. In a Senate campaign against black liberal Democrat Harvey Gantt in 1990, Helms hammered the fact that Gant had enriched himself personally from the racial set-aside programs he advocated. Broder considers Helms’s insensitivity in disclosing this fact as "history not to be sanitized."
Moreover, in 1986 Helms had opposed the congressional act by which Martin Luther King’s birthday became a national holiday. At that time he had said unkind things about the slain civil rights leader, thereby giving damning evidence of his flawed and divisive personality.
Although for all I know Jesse Helms has undiscovered Klan sheets that he tries on behind locked doors, Broder does not show that he is a white racist, using that term in a non-demagogic sense. What he demonstrates is that Helms is not as politically correct as he is--or politicians who share Broder’s liberal opinions.
Why should opposing racial quotas and pointing out that one’s opponent’s support of them yielded personal gain be equated with incitement of racial hate? As far as I know, Broder has never criticized the black and Hispanic congressmen who harp on the malice of white people. Why is a white politician to be labeled as "racist" for insisting that all American citizens are entitled to equal rights under the law, whereas minority leaders, in Broder’s universe, can attack white society and white culture with impunity?
Moreover, the charges that Helms raised against King were mostly true, albeit sometimes tactlessly made. In fact the North Carolina senator was far from the only one in Washington politics who complained about King’s association with Communists, his frequent philandering, and his presentation of the Vietnam War as a "racist struggle."
More than thirty Senators and former President Reagan, before he allowed his mind to be changed on the subject, resisted the proposal to elevate King’s birthday into a national holiday. Note the critics, including Helms, did not deny that King had behaved heroically in life-threatening situations. They simply questioned the propriety of turning him into a secular saint receiving obligatory worship.
Broder is free to disagree on this point, as I did when Helms took other stands: e.g., his angry call for the cutting off of all trade, during the recent imbroglio with China and, his slighting, when the question of compensation came up, of the abuses inflicted on Japanese Americans during World War Two. (The second case is tactically unfortunate, since Helms could have easily blamed the forced Japanese resettlements on the liberal politicians and ACLU spokesmen who were its most fervent advocates at the time.) In any case one can disagree with statements made by Helms in a long senatorial career without branding him as a racial bigot.
Even less acceptable, and downright totalitarian, is the manner in which Broder condemns those who differ with him as being bad for American society. Who the devil made this guy into our moral judge? That is the question that pops into my mind each time I hear other journalists kowtowing to him on TV—or his laying down of rules of discourse for his fellow-citizens.
It is doubtful that Helms will remain for our "dean of American political commentators" the "last white racist" whose presence is degrading the American government. He is simply the most recent "racist" to be pounced on, for not taking the positions Broder wants the rest of us to hold.
September 8, 2001
Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of the highly recommended After Liberalism.
Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com
Broder will not amount to a polyp on the colon of the body politic.
I've hated him since the first article I read of his defending x42 and blasting Ken Starr and Linda Tripp. Telling us how they were the great evil and x42 was the innocent victim of partisan politics.
He forgot to mention that all his party and x42 EVER practice are partisan politics to the nines. Hypocrite!
I hate him.
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