President Carter just called out SC Rep. Joe Wilson for his “You Lie!” outburst.

“That racism inclination still exists, and I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of belief among many white people — not just in the South but around the country — that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply,” Carter said.

Get ready for the all-too-predictable backlash. Because Wilson didn’t explicitly mention race, he will cry foul and conservatives will attack Carter’s comments as – you guessed it – racist.

Interestingly, Maureen Dowd weighed in on this a day before Carter:

Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”

…For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both…

An interesting storyline here is the predominance of South Carolinians leading the charge against Obama. Dick Polman in the Philadelphia Inquirer takes us all down memory lane, in an article sure to be decried as more South Carolina-bashing.

“An anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts was nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor by a colleague wielding a cane. The assailant was Preston Brooks, from…surprise…South Carolina. Brooks became the Joe Wilson of his day. South Carolinians were so thrilled with his behavior that they showered him with gifts, especially new canes.”

Of course Polman discusses the Atwater playbook – which appears certain to play a key role in the upcoming elections of 2010 and 2012. With even minor school bus fights turned into race-baiting judgements on ‘Obama’s America’ by Drudge and Limbaugh, so much for the punditocracy’s eager predictions of a happy, Kumbaya-singing post-racial America.

“I don’t believe works of art should be ennobling. I don’t believe the heroes should be virtuous, or that bad characters should get their comeuppance. It can show deeply violent and deeply cruel people, and tell us that — as in real life — they can be charismatic and successful and never pay a price for their cruelty. But what it should never do is tell us that human suffering itself is trivial. It should never turn pain into a punch-line…

Not long after 9/11, Tarantino said: “It didn’t affect me because there’s, like, a Hong Kong action movie… called Purple Storm and they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a skyscraper.” It’s a case-study in atrophy of moral senses: to brag you weren’t moved by the murder of two and half thousand actual people, because you’d already seen it simulated in a movie. Only somebody who has never seen violence — who sees the world as made of celluloid — can respond like this.

Tarantino’s films aren’t even sadistic. Sadists take human suffering seriously; that’s why they enjoy it. No: Tarantino is morally empty, seeing a shoot-out as akin to dancing cheek-to-cheek. He sees violence as nothing. Compare his oeuvre to the work of a genuine cinematic sadist — Alfred Hitchcock — and you see the difference. Precisely because Hitchcock enjoyed inflicting pain, the pain is always authentic, and it is never emptied of its own inner horror.

And yet, and yet… I have to admit that part of me loves Tarantino’s films.”

“A fascinating portrait of an almost likable rogue…It makes a companion piece to Oliver Stone’s W…a remarkable portrait…heartbreaking.”

Now he sees a connection to the health care debates:

“I saw a documentary last year about Lee Atwater, the strategist for the Reagan and George H. W. Bush campaigns, the mentor of Karl Rove and George Bush. The man was a brilliant creator of memes…He made “Willie Horton” a code term. He got many people to believe “Michael Dukakis opposed the Pledge of Allegiance.” He was capable of outrageous invention, as when about the Willie Horton ad he said with a straight face: “I don’t think a lot of Southerners even noticed there was a black man in that ad.”

Atwater might have been proud of “Death panels.” Those two little words have derailed the town hall meetings, by stirring up such unruly dissent that legislators have been shouted down by their own constituents…

What McCain should have done is focus on racial fear tactics.

From personal conversations, I know some leading Republicans feel this way (while others strongly disagree). Now Pat Buchanan has come out and said it. In a new article called a How To Handle Sonya, he writes:

“Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.

And McCain might be president.”

Nice, Pat. I especially like the sly lynching metaphor of “drape around the neck”.

What I find curious is the continued belief that the McCain camp didn’t use race as a weapon. I’ve commented about this before, in places such as the San Francisco Chronicle’s article Veiled Racism Seen in New Attacks on Obama:

“The key to Atwater’s success was that the candidates themselves remained above the fray. “They were friendly, like (Ronald) Reagan,” Forbes said. “Just like now, Palin is the friendly face, or George W. Bush was the guy you wanted to have a beer with. They’ll dance around it and say (these tactics) aren’t racist, but they are.”

This I’m-above-the-fray stuff really works. Despite all the offensive rhetoric that came from McCain’s party and his team, including the ethnically-tinged constant use of ‘Hussein’, and all the code words like ’socialist’ and ‘community organizer’, and despite his own misleading references to Jeremiah Wright, since McCain never actually aired his TV ad about Wright (that mysteriously leaked to ABC), and he wasn’t officially connected to this Jeremiah Wright ad, and since he authorized an ad that was subtly rather than overtly racist, many journalists believe McCain ran a non-racially-tinged campaign. Frank Rich is a notable exception.

But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

More later.

We just checked out Barry Levinson’s (Rain Man, Diner, Wag the Dog etc.) new documentary Poliwood at its Tribeca Film Festival premiere. It’s about a bunch of actors, including Spike Lee, Ron Silver, Ellen Burstyn, Susan Sarandon, and Anne Hathaway, who go to the ‘08 GOP and Dem Conventions (where Boogie Man was playing, btw) with Hollywood’s Creative Coalition. Every year I produce network TV awareness campaigns with celebrities, so it raised a lot of interesting questions. Why do some actors get so attacked for addressing issues? Which celebs really know their stuff and which don’t? Are certain ones ‘using’ issues for image rehab or to boost their Q-rating?

I wonder if some of the backlash isn’t because Americans resent being ‘lectured to’ by glamorous, insanely rich, good-looking, occasionally incredibly talented people. It doesn’t matter if, as several actors in the film protest, they often come from working class backgrounds. We want our celebs to glimmer, to be otherworldly, above us. They provide Americans a quotidian connection with the divine, like roadside shrines to the Gods in ancient Greece. LeBron James – Hercules. Angelina Jolie – Hecate. Roger Clemens – Icarus? It’s even better when the gods are flawed; petty, shallow, squabbling – like us, only more so.

Anyhow, one scene in the film blew my mind.

Legendary Republican consultant Frank Luntz attempts to begin a presentation to the group. He’s the guy who started out with Newt and ate the Democrats’ lunch for the better part of the last decade, expertly influencing public opinion with expert wordsmithing, eg. changing “estate tax” to “death tax” to provoke visceral outrage. He’s become something of a bete noire to the left. Whatever you may think of the guy, doesn’t it make sense to at least listen?

Luntz launches into ball-busting Alec Baldwin Glengarry Glen Ross mode. He says their cause – increased arts funding – is noble, but they have no clue how to use language. Here it is, Boogie Man viewers, the central Lee Atwater insight: Democrats connect with the intellect, and Republicans wallop them by reaching voters’ emotions.

So what happens?

Fascinated, the actors listen intently as this PhD. from Oxford shares the insightful wordsmithing techniques he used to help the GOP reshape America, right?

No.

A couple of actors get pissed at Luntz’s ball-busting, angrily attack him, and derail the session. The film cuts to actress Susan Sarandon, protesting afterwards that she wanted to hear what Luntz had to say. Of course she did. She’s incredibly smart and could have put his techniques to good use.

At the Tribeca Q&A, one actor said somewhat sheepishly he thought Luntz had suckered him into his emotional response. (Ironically proving Luntz’s point: we’re all controlled by our emotions). Luntz denied it, saying as a lifelong TV watcher he was totally traumatized by such a brouhaha with TV stars.

A sad moment for American arts funding and cross-party dialogue. Damn. What could Luntz and these activists have accomplished?

Posted 5/7/2009

Columbia-Dupont Award Winner Adam Davidson of NPR livened up the panel a just a wee bit with his insistence that no one could have predicted the 2008 housing/derivatives/etc. crash. I pointed out that guys like Krugman and Buffett kinda did. (In this 2006 clip from Bloomberg, Krugman actually uses the word ‘bubblicious.)

It was great getting to spend some time with Paul Salopek. This m-f’er can write his you-know-what off. Here’s one of the best ledes ever written.

I was fascinated hearing David Barstow from the Times talk about Message Machine, his now-classic exposé. He said it was a little daunting waking up in the morning realizing he was taking on the Pentagon, huge defense contractors, and all of our major TV networks. The Pentagon’s been excoriating him as a damned liar. I’m not sure people understand the heat journalists take sometimes.

UPDATE: Frank Rich just wrote:

“When Barstow’s story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld’s current spokesman cited the inspector general’s “exoneration” to attack the Times articles as fiction.

But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general’s report, not The Times’s reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow’s charges.”

Perhaps the most amazing revelation in Barstow’s recent NY Times Q&A is this:

Q. Your article refers to the fact, on several occasions, the various network “handlers” are unaware of the liaison the “military analysts” enjoy with Pentagon staff. How can that be? Are they that naive?

— desertrat, Las Vegas, Nev.
A. In interviews, many military analysts said the same thing — that the network officials they deal with the most (the bookers, producers and anchors) had only the vaguest idea of the frequency or subject matter of their interactions with the Pentagon…Several analysts said that on the basis of a briefing, they might then pitch an idea for a segment to a producer or booker. Sometimes they would even help write the questions for the anchors to ask during the segment.

How had The Duke weathered the storm? Would he be defensive about Lee Atwater, Willie Horton, the Tank Ride, and other painful memories?

Dukakis watches Atwater calling him a hypocrite

We’d found incredible historical footage, much of it never before seen. I had a clip of Lee holding forth to an admiring gaggle of reporters, calling Dukakis “a hypocrite” and ridiculing him as “out-of-touch…one of those double-dipped frostbelt Kennedy liberals.” I planned to show it to the Governor on-camera, for the first time. How would he respond?

Dukakis had never met Lee face-to-face. Now, in a way, he would.

I’ve got to admit, I was a little tense. Would he be upset with me for confronting him with this footage? Would he have a strong comeback for Lee? Would we capture an incredible moment, creating a dialogue with history?

I pressed ‘play’. Out came the ghost of Lee Atwater that had haunted the Democrats for so long…