A hell of a lot of white pundits flaunt their academic credentials to appear as teevee historians and discuss things in ways that professional historians find laughable: e.g. Doris Kerns Goodwin, Michael Bechschloss, etc. They don’t do primary source-based research to come up with novel arguments in their snoozeriffic celebretory and historical celebrity-driven presidential histories–they’re essentially popularizers. And yet their dubious comparisons in presidential history don’t get the kind of flack that MHP is getting.

(Gene Lyons’s article is a good example of the sneering condescention MHP has drawn. But then, Lyons is an old Arkansas journalist who knows very intimately the trashing of the Clintons, so while I think he makes some interesting points he surely could have done it without the personal trashing of MHP and her academic credentials.)

So I would argue that race is everywhere in this whole dustup; I’m just not persuaded by Harris-Perry’s arguments with respect to white progressives’ evaluation of the Obama presidency. Who knows–she may be right, but we won’t know for at least another 13 months for sure.

MHP is BS’ing all the way in her first article. As political scientist she compares the obama presidency with the clinton presidency without even mentioning the economy? without comparing how clinton stood down house republicans and won huge victory when he called their bluff and let them shut down the government and stuck them with the blame, while Obama caved at every step?

Her first article was miles away from a real professional level political argument where you are supposed to make valid comparisons and not just make stuff up at random.

Her defense is even weaker. Many, many comments on Salon addressed the legitimate reasons that progressives are disgusted with Obama. So many things that are utterly obvious yet she ignored completely to claim race is involved. Instead of admitting that she was wrong she doubled down.

Look, if you want to make that kind of argument as a random talking head, OK, it gets attention at least, and maybe you think you have a mission to raise consciousness on race. But her argument was so, so far away from serious political science that to bring up her academic credentials to defend that article in any way is amazingly ignorant.

She goes on TV behind her academic credentials. These 2 articles expose her as completely unqualified. There is a certain professional level of argument, marshaling of facts and data and logic and a way that fellow professionals have to acknowledge. That was totally absent from these 2 articles.

Yes!

It seems to me that there are a lot of people trying to obscure the reality that the economy is in the toilet and people need work. This will not be lost on the people who are living the reality. Hard times will decide the next presidential election, not skin color. And folks who are colorstruck will need to just deal with it.

Walsh provided some good evidence that racism is at least not the main cause of Obama’s dwindling support, but there was a troubling thread of “postracial” wistfulness running through her response that became obvious at the end when she claimed class was a more important issue than race. (I’m not getting into the race/class argument going on above, which is slightly different.) I think feminists of all races have seen privileged dudes derailing conversations on gender issues in a similar way: “Sure, maybe bad things happen to women sometimes but isn’t class the real issue here?” and so on. Any time someone asserts that one axis of oppression is more important than another it leads somewhere bad and class is a favorite of privilege-deniers because it’s much easier to imagine that one is or has been at some point in life poor than to imagine that one is a different sex or race.

Since he’s not, of course it matters.”

But not to the people voting against him because he’s a plutocrat who’s in the process of deeply fucking them over. Again, all you’re doing is isolating out his race and then pointing at it and going “The only meaningful difference *I* can see is his race. Therefore it must mean something meaningful.”

At the end of the day, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. A plutocrat in any color is going to fuck over the poor and middle class. And race analysis is cheap, easy and comes with the convenient class-based scapegoats of poor white racist trash and middlebrow middle-class drones blind to their own inherent racism.

Race is a convenient class bludgeon, in other words. And you’re doing it quite well.