I admire digby as much as any other liberal blogger, and I've especially appreciated the way in which she has tried to inject some reason and sanity into an increasingly divisive primary season. However, I do wonder if she has perhaps become so committed to the idea that we're wasting our time on trivia that every dispute is automatically categorized as trivial.
Digby wrote a post today that approvingly quotes Walter Shapiro in Salon. The pertinent section of his column follows:
Of course, it does not take a video camera or a gossip-monger with a BlackBerry to turn the incendiary comments of a campaign surrogate into a voting issue. In the waning days of the 1884 campaign, Republican nominee James Blaine listened without objection as a New York City minister at a GOP rally denounced the Democrats as the party of "rum, Romanism and rebellion." All it took were some handbills and newspaper stories to inform Irish Catholic voters about Blaine's silence in the face of the slur -- and Democrat Grover Cleveland carried New York state (and with it the Electoral College) by a scant 1,149 votes.
It would be nice to believe that the American electorate has grown more sophisticated in the past 124 years. But you certainly cannot prove it by the latest twists in the Democratic race. The way the news coverage is going, pretty soon we will be arguing over the cosmic meaning of some comments by an alternate delegate from Idaho immortalized on a Facebook page. And by the time we get to the potentially rambunctious Denver convention, the final week in March may be remembered as the good old days of substantive political debate on the issues.
Digby responds to this with a simple, yet obviously heartfelt, "God help us." Unfortunately, Shapiro's illustration for his contention that American politics has a long tradition of pettiness actually proves the opposite point.
"Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." This was said in New York City a mere 19 years after the end of the Civil War in which a largely Democratic south rebelled against the United States. The Temperance Movement was in full swing in the 1880s, and it served to drive a wedge between Protestants and Catholics nearly as large as the Reformation of the 16th century. The pastor at that GOP rally said, in terms a bit more understandable to us, that the Democratic party was full of drunken Confederates who worshiped a false god in a false church.
Shapiro and digby seem to suggest that such remarks shouldn't have been enough to sway people's votes. Perhaps in a political utopia we could have expected all those NYC Irish Catholics to have already been convinced to vote for Cleveland because of the strength of his positions on the issues of the day. But couldn't the residents of even such a wonderful place be excused if they didn't want a President who shared those views?
Obviously too much of our political discourse focuses upon the trivial and petty. But that's not actually the problem with the Democratic primary this year. The problem is that it's a race between a black man and a woman, a primary process that's shining a bright light on the type of comments that our society is usually just too happy to ignore or gloss over. There's a lot of ugliness inside us - even Democrats! The only way to excise it is to bring it into the open, to expose the racism and misogyny of this society. I know that digby doesn't want to ignore or enable these problems. But we've been taught to ignore and cover up this stuff. It's a fine line between acknowledging real racism and misogyny and simply enabling a vapid press corps to focus on trivial faux-outrages and mock scandals. But this year, in 2008, it's our line to walk, and we need to try to do it well.
