How low can the Democrats go? How low can the Republicans go?

New York’s blind governor David Paterson is affable and likable, but I no longer have any respect for the man. First there was his wholly improper attempt to force New York State to adjust its laws to homosexual marriage. And now there is his gratuitous charge that Republicans have been using a racially tinged argument against Obama. WCBSTV reports:

… At the Crain’s Business Forum this morning, Paterson drew attention to a phrase used numerous times by speakers at the Republican National Convention to describe Barack Obama’s leadership experience: community organizer.

“I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama “black” in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention—a “community organizer.” They kept saying it, they kept laughing,” he said.

Paterson referred to McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin who compared her work experience to Obama’s.

“So I suppose a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities,” she said at the convention.

Paterson sees the repeated use of the words “community organizer” as Republican code for “black.”

“I think where there are overtones is when there are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people’s progress with a subtle reference to their race,” he said.

But the McCain/Palin campaign quickly fired back in a statement, saying: “It is disappointing that Governor Paterson would launch accusations of racism…. Governor Palin’s remarks about Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer was in response to the Obama campaign’s belittling of her executive experience.”

Of course, Obama has made his three years as a community organizer central to his biography and to his supposed preparation for the presidency, mentioning it far more often than his eight years as a state senator. He also (as Kirsten Powers has pointed out) made fun of the size of Sarah Palin’s town and called her a “former mayor,” when she is a sitting governor. She was therefore perfectly justified in striking back at him by mocking his experience as a community organizer. She did not criticize the work of community organizers as such (though she certainly could have done so). Her point was simply that the job of community organizer does not entail the same kind of executive experience as the job of mayor. Yet for this entirely legitimate comment, hysterically outraged Democrats have accused Palin of deriding community organizers, and now a Democratic governor accuses her of making a veiled racial put-down of blacks.

In their false charges against Palin, the Democrats have been behaving contemptibly. But in their wholesale abandonment of principle, the Republicans have been behaving contemptibly. Welcome to the 2008 presidential election, in which both parties deserve to be routed and destroyed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 10, 2008 01:24 AM | Send