Sen. Harry Reid: Should he resign?

last updated 8 January 2015

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is lucky he’s a liberal, said Rich Lowry in National Review. A new book quotes Reid as saying in 2008 that then–presidential candidate Barack Obama benefited from being “light-skinned” and from having “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Any conservative using similarly “archaic speech” would have been hounded from office, just as former Republican Sen. Trent Lott was toppled from his majority leader perch for his “foolish praise of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 presidential campaign.” But Obama and other black Democrats immediately forgave Reid. The “double standard” is blatant, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. If a Republican says something stupid about race, he is assumed to have revealed his true feelings, and is roundly condemned. When a Democrat does the same thing, “the liberal establishment goes into overdrive explaining why it’s no big deal.”

As a liberal Democrat, said Joan Walsh in Salon.com, I admit I find it “depressing” that a Democratic leader used the phrase “Negro dialect.” But Reid’s gaffe is hardly in the same category as Trent Lott’s shocking endorsement of segregation. Reid was “talking, perhaps inelegantly, about why he’s wholeheartedly supporting our first black president.” Lott was “wishing the country had elected a racist” Dixiecrat as president, adding that if we had, we could have avoided a lot of “problems.” That’s blatant, heartfelt racism. Besides, in his clumsy way, Reid had a valid point: Because Obama is “light-skinned and biracial,” he was able to put “white folks at ease.” To pretend otherwise is to be “willfully blind to the realities of politics.”

No one recognizes those realities better than Obama himself, said Jeff Zeleny in The New York Times. Variously criticized for being either too black or not black enough, he walked a careful line during the 2008 campaign, downplaying race when addressing white audiences, and adopting “a certain staccato and rhythm” for black audiences. And Obama’s light skin color is every bit as significant as his fluency in racial idioms, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. We may not talk about it openly, but it’s no “coincidence that so many pioneers—Edward Brooke, the first black senator since Reconstruction; Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice; Colin Powell, the first black secretary of state—have been lighter skinned.” Reid’s remark may have been “bad politics,” but it was “good sociology.”