Reid a racist?

By now I’m sure you’ve heard how a new book by John Heilmann and Mark Halperin quotes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as saying he encouraged Barack Obama to run for president because, for one thing, he is, “light-skinned” and has “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Reid quickly apologized to everyone and is trying to put the controversy behind him. (Read about it here.)

The larger question is whether this has exposed a much bigger problem of hypocrisy in the Democratic Party. When Trent Lott spoke at a birthday party for Strom Thurmond in 2002, he said the nation would have been better off if Thurmond had been elected president when he ran in 1948. Thurmond had run on a platform that year that included racial segregation. Although Lott never actually mentioned segregation, his praise of Thurmond was enough to force him to resign. Other Republicans ran for cover. No one, it seemed, wanted to defend him.

But now Democrats are rushing to the defense of Harry Reid. (Read it here.)

To provide some perspective, read a column here by Cal Thomas, who argues this is a clear double standard. Of local interest, Thomas notes that Reid is a Mormon, and yet no one in the media is mentioning this or the church’s policy of excluding blacks from the priesthood before 1978, and yet Republican Mitt Romney was under constant scrutiny for his Mormon beliefs.

Then read this blog post from Newsweek supporting Reid. The author argues there is a huge difference between supporting someone who ran as an avowed racist and supporting Obama and offering a candid, if indelicately worded, assessment of political realities.

My take? Politics is the art of nit-picking an opponent’s words and actions, and of drawing connections between events even if they aren’t exactly the same. That said, Reid’s use of the word “negro” and his description of Obama as light-skinned are troubling. It is reminiscent, as Thomas wrote, of how Joe Biden once described Obama as “clean and articulate,” as if other black people were not.

Maybe Reid was simply offering cold political analysis; or maybe not. All we know is what he said, and it’s troubling. As for hypocrisy in how Reid is treated as a Mormon, the difference lies mostly in how his party feels about that. The attacks against Romney’s religion were largely generated from within the Republican Party. Democrats seem to worry more about ideology than religious affiliation.

Meanwhile, Reid has a lot more pressing worries at home, where a new poll finds that most Nevadans don’t like the job he’s doing, and that he trails three potential GOP challengers. (Read it here.)

What is your take?