Stop talking, Ms. Walsh.
—Bill O’Reilly, June 2009
As much as I believe a bold, twenty-first-century Keynesian strategy to restore the economy would have helped Obama politically, even if Republicans and conservative Democrats opposed it, the president had political opponents who couldn’t be soothed by inspiring Rooseveltian rhetoric. Sometimes I tried to write off the madness of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party as mere right-wing ranting, therapeutic identity politics for aging white people. Yet there was something more disturbing going on. At the same time that the Tea Party emerged, to “take our country back” from a president they insisted was illegitimate, several high-profile murders by right-wing crazies made it feel as if the increasingly extreme political rhetoric might be driving the unhinged to violence.
In April 2009, an unemployed Beck fan named Rich Poplawski, who’d been stockpiling weapons, shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers. “Rich, like myself, loved Glenn Beck,” his best friend told reporters. Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way,” his friend said—the fictional gun ban that had been conjured up by Beck and his NRA friends. The next month an antiabortion zealot walked into a Lutheran church and murdered Dr. George Tiller, a local abortion provider, as Tiller served as an usher during Sunday services.
Tiller had been the object of an organized smear campaign on the right; he’d been shot before, and his clinic had been firebombed. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly in particular had crusaded against the man he called “Tiller the Baby Killer,” with twenty-eight segments on the Kansas doctor in four years. He depicted Tiller as a Nazi who had “blood on his hands”—and he insisted that Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius and anyone else who didn’t “stop” Tiller had “blood on their hands,” too. The fanatical Scott Roeder stopped Tiller, all right, with a bullet through the eye at close range.
A few days after Tiller’s murder, an elderly white supremacist who was also an anti-Obama “birther,” James Von Brunn, walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and murdered an African American security guard before he was arrested. It was getting a little scary. On Hardball, Chris Matthews announced, “This is a political action today by a far-right extremist, and I just wonder what’s in the water.”
I fatefully replied, “I want to be very careful here, Chris. The only people responsible are the people who pulled the triggers. . . . However, I don’t think you can deny that there is a rising climate of right-wing hate, a lot of it directed at Obama. . . . He’s a secret Muslim. He hates America. He wasn’t born here. This guy, Von Brunn, he was one of the birthers. . . . I don’t blame mainstream Republicans, by any means, for this. But they could help in ratcheting down some of the rhetoric. When Bill O’Reilly goes on TV every night and calls Dr. Tiller a baby-killer and a Nazi and a Mengele and shows where he works . . . demonizing a private citizen for doing a lawful job. Why is that acceptable? I would like to see a debate about that.”
I got my debate. The next day, O’Reilly invited me onto his Fox show to discuss my charges.
Preparing for the O’Reilly Factor, I foolishly rehearsed a rational argument for why the right’s violent talk about liberals might be contributing to the climate of violence, especially in the months since we’d elected our first black president. I had examples of times O’Reilly himself had attacked folks on the left for their inflammatory rhetoric (though none of it ever led to murder). Yet O’Reilly made the debate all about the evil of Dr. Tiller and late-term abortion—and turned me into Tiller’s accomplice.
“Do you feel that late-term fetuses deserve any protections at all, Ms. Walsh?” he asked to open the segment and he badgered me with the same question at least three more times. Having been raised Catholic, I’m prochoice but still ambivalent about abortion, especially late-term. I told O’Reilly I considered it a tragedy and accepted current law limiting it to saving the life of the mother.
O’Reilly was an angry bully, telling me once, “Stop talking, Ms. Walsh,” and berating me for accusing him “of being a vile accomplice to murder.”
I corrected him.
“I said you were vile. I did not accuse you of being an accomplice to murder.”
He kept it up. “You know who has blood on their hands? You . . . you have blood on your hands because you portray this man as a hero when he killed late-term babies for casual reasons.”
It was traumatic. I got a lot of praise from liberals for standing up to O’Reilly. I also got several thousands of e-mails and letters to Salon, many of them calling me a murderer and telling me that they wished my mother had aborted me or that my daughter had been forcibly aborted, in vivid, disturbing detail. Such good Christians. I didn’t receive any actual death threats; a more experienced journalist friend explained it’s not a death threat if someone merely wishes you were dead, only if they specifically threaten to kill you themselves. I guess that was reassuring.
The hate mail rattled me. Yet the worst thing was, I knew a lot of my uncles and cousins had standing dates with O’Reilly every night at 8:00 p.m. sharp on Long Island. It was one thing to defend Obama; now I was defending abortion, of all things, an issue we had stopped discussing in my extended family back in the early 1970s. In the hours between when the show taped and when it aired, I thought of my retired-cop cousin, who loved me despite my politics but loved O’Reilly, too. He would almost certainly be watching, along with his wife, whose cancer had returned and whom I knew wasn’t doing very well.
The minute the awful segment ended, my cell phone rang. It was my cousin’s wife. “I’m very proud of you,” she told me in a voice so soft I could barely hear it. “And I love you.” I thought of my mother’s grief after a priest condemned prochoice Catholics to hell, just before she died. I felt a kind of grace coming from my mother, through my cousin’s brave wife. I didn’t know whether my mother or my cousin’s wife was personally prochoice; they were just good Catholics who knew the issue wasn’t as simple, morally, as bullies such as O’Reilly tried to make it seem.
She died three weeks later. At her funeral, my cousin told me it was the last phone call she had made. Other than that, no one in my family mentioned the O’Reilly segment at all.
• • •
The political bullying continued. By August, the Tea Party movement exploded into congressional town halls, where raging protesters shouted down Democrats and Republicans alike, demanding that they block “Obamacare.” Hundreds descended on a Tampa Democrat’s meeting, and a local newspaper described the event as “more like a wrestling cage match than a panel discussion on national policy.” Maryland representative Frank Kratovil was hung in effigy, Long Island representative Tim Bishop needed a police escort from an angry town hall to his car, and North Carolina representative Brad Miller reported death threats.
In New Hampshire, a government-hating activist sported a gun in a leg holster outside an Obama speech while carrying a sign proclaiming, “It’s time to water the tree of liberty,” a disturbing reference to Thomas Jefferson’s “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Ominously, a protester dropped a gun at a raucous Safeway “Meet and Greet” sponsored by Tuscon’s Gabrielle Giffords.
Sarah Palin turned up the heat with her fateful claim that Obama wanted to establish “death panels” to decide who deserved life-saving treatment and who didn’t. Instead of denying Palin’s lie, formerly centrist GOP senator Chuck Grassley amplified it, charging that the president wanted “to pull the plug on Grandma.” (Even after that vicious charge, Democrats would still spend weeks seeking Grassley’s support for a bill before giving up.)
Violent talk got louder as the health-care vote approached the next March. A Christian libertarian with militia ties called for “Days of Rage” to block the bill, writing on his blog: “If you wish to send a message that Pelosi and her party cannot fail to hear, break their windows. . . . Break them with rocks. Break them with slingshots. Break them with baseball bats. But BREAK THEM.”
The weekend after that blog post, a brick reading “No Obamycare” sailed through the window of the Wichita, Kansas, Democratic Party headquarters; another brick smashed the window of the party’s Rochester, New York, office, this time adorned with Barry Goldwater’s old message “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Someone shot out the front door of Gabrielle Giffords’s Tucson office, and another Arizona Democrat, Raul Grijalva, reported death threats. The Senate’s sergeant at arms reported that threats against Congress members rose 300 percent in the early months of 2010.
Gabby Giffords complained about the violence in an interview a few days later, telling MSNBC that she’d been targeted for defeat in 2010 by Sarah Palin’s PAC with gun imagery. “We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district,” she told Chuck Todd. “And when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there are consequences to that action.”
Nine months later, Giffords was struggling to survive an assassination attempt, the first against a member of Congress since 1954. An unemployed community college dropout, Jared Lee Loughner, shot eighteen people and killed six, including a nine-year-old girl, at one of Giffords’s “Congress on your Corner” gatherings, the same event where a protester had dropped a gun during the Tucson Democrat’s tense August 2009 town hall appearance. It wasn’t far from Giffords’s district office, where someone had shattered the glass front door the night the health-care reform bill passed. Although it turned out that Loughner had no known right-wing ties, it’s easy to understand why Giffords’s father, when asked whether his daughter had enemies, told the New York Post tearfully, “Yeah, the whole Tea Party.”
Yet again, as after the Tiller murder, the mere suggestion that we examine the increasingly violent rhetoric of politics was itself derided as politically inflammatory in the days after the Giffords shooting. Of all of the overheated rhetoric that came in for scrutiny, Sarah Palin’s poster putting Giffords in crosshairs got the most discussion, especially because of the eerie March interview where Giffords herself suggested that such violent imagery could have “consequences.”
In the days after Giffords’s shooting, Palin self-destructed in a mess of rage, narcissism, and revenge over complaints about her rhetoric, making herself out to be the victim in a tragedy where six people had died. In an interview with Sean Hannity, she made it clear that she would not let her enemies stop her. “We should not use an event like that in Arizona to stifle debate,” Palin told the admiring Hannity. “They can’t make us sit down and shut up. And if they succeeded in doing that, our Republic would be destroyed.”
After her Giffords meltdown, I wrote in Salon, “Sarah Palin will never be president.” Yet the strategy of bullying and dehumanizing and intimidating Democrats that she pioneered in 2008 didn’t go away.
• • •
With some of the media’s blessing, conservatives smeared liberals who questioned intimidating right-wing rhetoric as the real intimidators. They did the same thing when it came to race. Liberals who complained about racism in the right’s treatment of President Obama found themselves derided as the real racists, seeing slurs where none existed and tossing the term racist at innocent whites with intent to harm.
I was caught in a particularly dizzying hall of mirrors, where one day I’d be denouncing anti-Obama racism on the right, and the next day I might be denounced by Obama supporters for my own supposed racial bias if I criticized the president’s decisions.
My role as one of Obama’s white-liberal defenders intensified during two racial controversies in the summer of 2009: Obama’s nomination of the first Latina, Sonia Sotomayor, to the Supreme Court, and the flap over Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates’s arrest by a white police officer when he appeared to be breaking into his own home. They exposed what a minefield 21st century racial politics had become, for all of us, whatever our color or our politics.
Republicans immediately denounced Sotomayor as a “racist” because she had suggested, during a speech encouraging nonwhite students to pursue legal careers, that the life experiences of “a wise Latina” might make her rulings “better than” a white judge’s. (At her hearings, she backed away from the remarks, which I thought was the right move; the point is equality, not replacing white men with Latinas as the “better” group) Sotomayor had also sided with an appeals-court majority in backing the city of New Haven’s fire department’s affirmative action plan, which had been challenged by a white firefighter denied promotion. I got dragged into that mess in a Hardball debate that was shocking for its tribalism.
It was Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, and I, three Irish Catholics, with the two men yelling at me for suggesting (with plenty of evidence) that fire departments had worked hard to keep their ranks white. In New York, a city that’s majority black and Latino, the fire department was at the time 91 percent white. In San Francisco, the position of fire chief had been handed down from one Irishman to another, a roster of Sullivans and Kellys and Murrays and Murphys and a Walsh (no relation). When the string was broken by former mayor Willie Brown’s pick, the veteran African American chief Bob Demmons, the heavily Irish union went into near-mutiny. Matthews, normally my ally, lost it a little when I described how hard fire departments fought to exclude blacks.
He yelled at me, “Damn it, Joan, the guys that got killed on 9/11, a lot of them were Irish and they chose to be firefighters, because it’s a family tradition going back to the nineteenth century . . .”
And I yelled back. “Don’t race-bait me, Chris. There are firefighters in my family. God bless them . . .”
“Then why are you accusing them of bigotry?
“Because the fact of the matter is that they have protected those jobs for their brothers, for their sons, and they’re public sector jobs. This isn’t the family business, Chris. Bravery comes in all colors.”
Of course, the real issue was that good jobs for working-class kids, of every race, had all but disappeared, and the only way to create opportunities for African Americans in cities such as New Haven was to take them away from whites. So, who won my debate with Matthews? Pat Buchanan, without saying a word.
Right after the Sotomayor storm passed, Harvard’s African American studies chair Henry Louis Gates returned from a trip without his house keys and got arrested for trying to break into his own Cambridge home after a verbal scuffle with a local cop. Asked about the Gates arrest, Obama first said he didn’t know all of the facts about the case of “my friend Skip Gates”—and then waded into the controversy anyway, opining that the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly.” The minor squabble became national news because it fit an unfortunate narrative: race trumping class for a Democratic president. Race aside, the class optics of the Gates dispute weren’t great for Obama: an Ivy League president sides with his Ivy League buddy, “Skip,” against a working-class Irish American cop named Crowley.
It’s not hard to see how partisans interpreted this event with two diametrically opposed mind-sets. On the race-obsessed right, it showed that no matter how high privileged black people climbed—to the top of the Ivy League, even to the White House—they’d still play the race card against a working-class cop just doing his job. On the left, it was proof that a black man, no matter how accomplished, would always be guilty in the eyes of a cop. In the end, blowback forced the president to “recalibrate” his remark about the cops behaving “stupidly” and invite Gates and Crowley to the White House for a “beer summit.”
Fox had its magic moment in the Gates affair. After the president weighed in on Gates, Glenn Beck called our half-white president a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Rush Limbaugh loudly agreed. When I called that notion ridiculous on Hardball, Limbaugh named me the “Magic Honky”—and said I was “the real racist.”
That long summer of strife—the town hells, the Sotomayor debate, Gates-gate—took a toll on Obama’s standing, especially with white voters. His approval rating among whites had stayed above 60 percent in Gallup’s tracking poll well into May 2009, when he nominated Sotomayor. Then it began to drop, and it dropped sharply the week the Gates flap dominated the news. It continued to drop, down into the 30s by September, where it would stay persistently through mid-2012.
Yet nothing summed up the degraded state of racial discourse in the age of Obama more than the saga of Shirley Sherrod, a black woman smeared by the president’s right-wing enemies and too quickly abandoned by the Obama administration itself, whose message held the key to reconciling the too often conflicting claims of race and class—except no one bothered to listen to her.
• • •
Sherrod owed her awful fifteen minutes of racial infamy to the late right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart. A Web self-promoter who’d worked with Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge, Breitbart launched his own network of right-wing sites and declared his intent to “take down the institutional left.” By the end of Sherrod’s ordeal, media critics were debating whether Sherrod, not Breitbart, was the racist. There I was again, on television decrying racism, a piñata for the right. Yet this time, the Obama administration and some of its allies wound up on the wrong side, for a while.
The mess began with the historic health-care reform vote, when thousands of Tea Party supporters converged on Washington, D.C., to protest the bill. Some Tea Partiers harassed black legislators as they walked to cast their votes. One spat on Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Kentucky, on camera; another called civil rights hero Representative John Lewis “nigger,” Lewis told reporters. That triggered a renewed debate over how much the anti-Obama movement was powered by racism. Andrew Breitbart denied that the racial insults even happened. He offered a reward to anyone who could prove that John Lewis, the firebrand of the 1963 March on Washington, who’d been brutally beaten in the 1965 Selma march, was actually called the N-word.
When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) asked the Tea Party to “repudiate” its racist fringe after the attacks on Lewis and Cleaver, Breitbart took revenge. He released video that appeared to show Sherrod, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, boasting about her own racism against a white farmer, to the laughter and applause of her NAACP audience. He headlined his story “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism—2010.” Sherrod and the NAACP’s “racism,” he wrote, is “a perfect rationalization for why the Tea Party needs to exist.”
The right wing finally found its black racist—and she worked for the Obama administration. But not for long. The USDA quickly fired Sherrod, and NAACP president Benjamin Jealous denounced her.
As the world now knows, the video was deceptively edited. Sherrod had told the opposite of a racist tale; she shared the moment she realized that poverty, not race, was the main factor keeping Southern farmers down and decided to help a white farmer on the verge of losing his land. “Working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have, versus those who don’t,” she told the NAACP, to applause. “They could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. It made me realize that I needed to work to help poor people.”
Sherrod’s father had been murdered by local whites who were never brought to justice, but her mother, she said, taught her that “if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we’d probably be dead now.” Sherrod tracked the root of the problem all the way back to the country’s beginnings. She told a story we rarely hear, and I heard in it echoes of my father’s black-Irish fairytale:
You know, back in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century . . . there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for seven years and get their freedom. . . . They married each other. They lived together. And they started looking at what was happening to them and decided “We need to do something about it” . . . Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, “Hey, we need to do something here to divide them.”
So that’s when they made black people servants for life. That’s when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That’s when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. . . . Over four hundred years later, and it’s still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us.
Within hours of Breitbart’s smear, the truth about Shirley Sherrod came out. The wife of the farmer in the story, Elise Spooner, contacted CNN, and soon the Spooners were on TV praising Sherrod for helping them keep their farm. Civil rights historians recognized Sherrod as a veteran of Georgia’s storied Albany Movement; her husband, Charles, had been its leader; he went on to serve as an Albany city councilmember. I tracked down King biographer Taylor Branch, who told me that when he heard the news, “I said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s Shirley Sherrod?’ She is such a gem. We should be listening to what she has to say.”
Yet few people listened to what she had to say. Representative Jim Clyburn told the New York Times that the Obama administration’s ignorance about Sherrod’s past showed that the president “needs some black people around him.” Really? Why go there? If our black president didn’t know enough civil rights history to recognize the Sherrods, clearly being black didn’t guarantee that knowledge. Maybe the president needed more people around him who know civil rights history, regardless of their race. Clyburn didn’t get Shirley Sherrod’s message, either. Here was a black woman standing up for poor people of every color, talking about class, not just race. Predictably, the right distorted her message and made her into a racist villain—that’s what they do. But liberals also found ways to make her story all about race and ignore her message about class.
When Sherrod complained about Breitbart’s racism and sued him, mainstream television news shows began debating whether her complaints about racism were “fair.” I defended Sherrod on MSNBC and CNN. In one segment, conservative Matt Lewis harrumphed that Sherrod had gone too far in calling Breitbart racist. I disagreed, noting that her father had been murdered by a white farmer, with witnesses, but the murderer never went to jail, adding, “She’s entitled to talk about race any way she wants to.”
Lewis shot back, “So, if you’ve had a bad experience in your background, you can say just anything you want?”
I got a little apoplectic. “‘A bad experience in your background?’ I’m talking about murder. Murder, Matt. . . . The idea that she shouldn’t be able to say Breitbart is racist is preposterous. She gets to say that because it’s true, and because from her vantage point it’s especially true.”
I couldn’t move the focus from Sherrod’s justifiably angry reaction to the right-wing assault on her character. Instead, the story remained Sherrod’s “smearing” of her smearers, and I was widely attacked on the right for defending Sherrod’s “racism.”
Yet soon I’d be facing down charges that I was the racist—not from Rush Limbaugh this time, but from Obama supporters.