Debate About Why Joe Wilson Heckled President Obama

Just to be clear about it, I have no idea if Representative Joe Wilson of Southern Carolina is a racist or not. Mr Wilson is the person around whom an ugly debate about race and opposition politics has crystallized in this country from the moment he was photographed - looking a little wild-eyed with passion - shouting the words "You Lie!" at President Obama during his speech to Congress.
It seems to me that only Mr Wilson knows for sure what motivated him, but his words are a brutal reminder that the election of Barack Obama did not usher in a new age of post-racial politics in the US. Wilson may have been seriously concerned with the expansion of government under Barack Obama and the level of borrowing needed to pay for it - it might equally have been simple anger at the idea of living under a black man in the White House.

In the angry, febrile atmosphere of modern American politics, though, every pundit and politician worth his or her salt (and quite a few who aren't) find no difficulty in interpreting Mr Wilson's motives with absolute conviction. Columnist Maureen Dowd wrote of "hearing" the unspoken word "boy" on the end of Mr Wilson's phrase. Nothing could have summed up more vividly and chillingly the context in which many liberals see the Wilson outburst. Here, they argue, was something that went beyond the disrespect of the president's office implied by mere heckling. Here was something that implied to anyone who knows the tone of American politics a contemptuous sense of racial superiority over the commander-in-chief.

Mr Wilson,at one time, worked for segregationist politician Strom Thurmond who once boasted that there were not enough troops in the American Army to force white southerners to share theatres and swimming pools with blacks. And he was part of a political rearguard that tried to stop the state of South Carolina from removing the flag of the old confederacy from the top of its capitol building. Some southern whites see the the flag as an honourable relic of a noble cause - just about all African-Americans see it as an ugly and offensive relic of slavery.

The Wilson family were swiftly deployed to counter the racist impression. The congressman's son said "there is not a racist bone in my dad's body" and his wife appeared in a political ad on TV talking about how she had called him after the Obama speech to ask who had interrupted the president. The point being, of course, that it never occurred to her that it would be him.

Former President Jimmy Carter raised the whole debate to a new level of seriousness by arguing in an interview with NBC TV that an "overwhelming proportion" of the hostility directed at Mr Obama is based simply on the fact that he is a black man.
Jimmy Carter: "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president."

During the presidential campaign Mr Obama and his aides worked tirelessly to ensure that his victory was not portrayed as a racially polarising reckoning with the past - a kind of payback for the black community after centuries of oppression and disadvantage. The last thing the administration wants to do now is create the impression that it views nearly all opposition to its plans as racist - that would be tantamount to arguing that no decent person could possibly disagree with the government's healthcare plans, or 'playing the race card', as we now call it.

Mr Carter's words were presumably directed at the nastier fringe of the people who do not like Mr Obama - like the angry fringe who carry posters of him dressed up as an African witch-doctor or persist in the hopeless belief that they can somehow "prove" he was not born in the US and that therefore, somehow, he cannot really be president.
Attaching motives to what people say and do is not easy in America. But in the end, the point is, it does not matter if Mr.Wilson is a racist or not; people will interpret his remark according to their own views. You draw your own conclusions.

And if history is any judge, you need not worry about Mr Wilson's prospects of re-election, by the way. South Carolina was traditionally a place apart in such matters. In 1856, a pro-slavery representative from the state called Preston Brooks took a gold-tipped cane and beat the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner half-to-death while an accomplice held off any would-be rescuers with a firearm. Mr Brooks of course, was forced to resign his seat, but when fresh elections were held, his constituents simply re-elected him and sent him back to Washington.