Sorry, Jimmy: Race Ain't the Only Card in the Deck

Jimmy Carter and other Obama defenders playing the race card must remember that it’s just one in a deck that’s driving the I’ve-had-it-up-to-here rhetoric of Joe Wilson and Glenn Beck, Frank Rich writes in the New York Times. “There is a national conversation we must have right now—the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it,” Rich says, for this angry minority “can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed.”

Beck—the anti-Limbaugh, with his youthful, affable demeanor—taps into a resentment transcending race. Obama, who hasn’t convinced many that things have changed from Wall Street to Washington, is merely a “scapegoat” for what ails right-wingers. “Racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession,” Rich writes. “He—and our political system—are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.”
(More race stories.)