Dear GOP: Stop Cowering Before Bad-Faith Race Card Attacks

Can Democrats come up with a better argument than calling people with different policy proposals racist? Can Republicans stop cowering in the face of such attacks?'

“Dear Mitch McConnell,” wrote Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., last week. “Why don’t you just go ahead and call Barack Obama the n-word? You know you want to.”

What led to this over-the-top racial attack from Pitts? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had the audacity to disagree with an approach taken by former President Barack Obama, who leaked audio of himself critiquing the Trump administration after new revelations about his involvement spying on the incoming Trump administration. McConnell thought it an unwise deviation from norms.

The political media used to agree about the importance of this norm. In 2007, former President Jimmy Carter “incited a tsk-tsking tsunami in the capital,” wrote The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich, for the offense of “failing to observe the protocol that former presidents should speak respectfully of their successors, or at least with some measure of restraint.”

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