7.13.00
Race Bating

7.13.00
Tired Feminist Claims

7.12.00
Talking Crazy

7.12.00
Liberal Second Thoughts

7.12.00
Don't Let Schools Off the Hook

7.11.00
Jane Austen & the First Gen Y

7.11.00
Hillary's Real Threat

7.10.00
Payback Time For Bill

7.10.00
Clintonian Dedication to Privacy

7.06.00
Gore's West Coast Dilemma

7.06.00
Au Courant!

7.05.00
Wait a Nano-Second…

7.05.00
A Bear in the Bullpen

7.05.00
Al's Way or the Highway?

7.03.00
A Battle Lost, A War Won?

7.03.00
Ignorance & American Liberty

7.03.00
The EPA’s Gas Problem

7.03.00
The British Are Groaning

7/13/00 11:45 a.m.
Race Baiting
At the NAACP, a (relatively) restrained Gore performance.

By Stephen F. Hayes, freelance writer & 2000 Phillips Foundation fellow

he most remarkable thing about Al Gore's speech yesterday to the NAACP is not what was in it, but what wasn't.

Absent was much of the standard Gore vitriol about Republicans and race. To be sure, he sharply criticized George W. Bush as an all-words/no-action candidate. But in doing so, he jettisoned a few of the more biting lines he previously used, as recently as this spring, to attack Republicans. "'We're advocating a color-blind society,' some of them say. Hellooooooo," Gore told a Democratic National Committee gathering on March 24. "They use that color-blind like duck hunters use a duck blind. They hide behind it and hope the ducks don't notice." It's a comparison that he has been using for more than two years, having first unveiled it, ironically, at a 1998 Martin Luther King Day speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

If we give the vice president an undeserved benefit of the doubt, his speechwriter was simply clumsy in his choice of metaphor. Or, as the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby and others have suggested, Gore may intentionally mean to suggest that given the opportunity, racist Republicans wouldn't mind having fewer black people around.

Thankfully, Gore has lightened up a bit. His NAACP speech fell short of the rousing (for Gore) sermon he's given to black groups in the past. In fact, save a few spirited passages here and there, his address was downright boring — a loosely reworked version of his stump speech, with some affirmative-action language at the end. Watching the address on CNN, I found myself vastly more interested in the small fluctuations of the Dow and Nasdaq tickers in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. (The Dow was down two during the speech, the Nasdaq up 10.) So, too, it seems, did the closed-captioning recorder, who kept substituting financial terms for Gore's words. "One-margin vote" became "one mortgage," and "interstate highway" was "interest rate highway." (See, it really was boring.)

He opened the speech with one of the Gore exaggerations that have become so common they hardly provoke comment any more . "I want to also introduce to you the finest presidential campaign manager in the history of this country," he told the enthusiastic crowd. "Donna Brazile." Colin Powell and J.C. Watts might disagree with Gore's assessment, as one of Brazile's many not-so-fine moments during her tenure as Gore campaign manager involved a reprehensible insult to them both. "Republicans bring out Colin Powell and J.C. Watts because they have no program, no policy," she said in an interview with Bloomberg.com. "They play that game because they have no other game. They have no love and no joy. They'd rather take pictures with black children than feed them."

Brazile's remarks drew strong responses from both Watts and Powell. In a letter to the vice president, Watts called the comments "deeply offensive" and "racist." Powell's missive was equally indignant. "I am disappointed and offended by Ms. Donna Brazile's remarks concerning me. We can debate and disagree over programs and approaches, but let's not start the new century by playing the polarizing race card," Powell wrote.

Gore plodded on through his speech — with fits and starts of enthusiasm — reciting the standard litany of Gore grievances. He peppered the address with his curious version of us-and-them politics, making nine separate references to "our people." Shortly thereafter, Gore seemed to confirm some of the suspicions of several harsh critics who had dismissed as mere politics his well-timed announcement this spring of more U.S. money to fight AIDS in Africa: "I have worked very hard on health-care issues here at home, and I've worked on foreign policy, and I formed a commission with South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki, and I have made more trips to Africa than I've made to Asia." (He didn't, for obvious reasons, mention which trips were more lucrative).

At one point, Gore even seemed to borrow a popular George W. Bush phrase in his rejection of privatizing Soshscurity. "I want incentives to invest on top of Social Security," he explained. "I'm for Social Security plus, not Social Security minus." (Bush has since 1995 used the phrase "English-plus" to discuss his views on English as the official national language, and on bilingual education.)

He defended affirmative action, as he has done consistently in public. (What Gore advocated in private is disputed; George Stephanopoulos claimed in All Too Human that Gore at one point wanted to scrap preference programs.)

Gore wrapped up his uninspiring speech with a strangely uncreative take-off on his favorite cliché of late: Talk is cheap. "Talk doesn't cost much. The true test is whether you are for an increase in the minimum wage. I am for an increase in the minimum wage for those who most need the help.

"Talk doesn't cost much. Taking a stand when it matters requires courage."

Talk, sometimes, doesn't cost much; but it can sometimes, of course, be very costly: especially the race ranting that turns out voters by dividing them. Gore's pointed questioning of Bush's sincerity in reaching out to minority groups is to be expected. But it will truly be shocking if the vice president avoids the racial invective that he has used in the past. It's the talk that Gore has talked for years, and we can only hope he continues to avoid it through November.

Back to the ticker.

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