[January 15, 2010] York Daily Record, Pa., Mike Argento column: York Daily Record, Pa., Mike Argento column Tweet Jan 15, 2010 (York Daily Record - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- At least he didn't call the president of the United States a colored boy. Of course, I'm referring to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his reference to Barack Obama during the 2008 election, as reported in a new book about the campaign, "Game Change." By now, you've probably heard Reid's remark that Obama had a good shot at being elected because he was "light-skinned . . . with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one." It was probably a generational thing. Reid is 70 years old, and old people have a tendency to use outdated expressions, such as the time Reid mentioned receiving "one of those cellular telephone telegraphs." It happens all the time. I've received calls from elderly people who refer to African-Americans, and the president, as "colored," but then again, more often than not, they're calling to express their desire for government to stay out of their Medicare. So it may be a generational thing. Or just dementia. And, again, in Reid's defense, he's from some backwater in rural Nevada. He probably never encountered a black person until he made his way to Vegas and met Joe Louis working as a greeter at the Golden Nugget. And he's a Mormon, and the Mormon church's history with race relations is, shall we say, spotty. So maybe his deployment of "Negro" took some effort in self-editing, marking it down from a more offensive epithet, which seems unlikely because Reid doesn't seem like the kind of person who throws around offensive language. He seems like the kind of person who goes through life trying not to offend anyone and trying to get along with everyone and never expressing a strong opinion about anything more controversial than whether he wants fries with that. In other words, it was astonishing that he could generate such controversy and passion by uttering something dumb because the man has the personality and leadership skills of a sponge -- the kind you wash dishes with, not the kind that lives at the bottom of the sea. At least the bottom-dwelling sponge appears to be a living thing. Speaking of bottom-dwelling sponges, the issue of race was also raised last week by everyone's favorite former governor of Illinois currently under indictment, Rod Blagojevich. In an interview with Esquire magazine, Blagojevich said, "I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived." There are a couple of things wrong with Blagojevich's assertion and his evidence backing it up. For one thing, photos of Blagojevich depict a middle-aged white guy with hair that appears to have been bought at an Elvis impersonator's yard sale. Even Michael Jackson looked "blacker" than Blagojevich, and Michael Jackson looked more like Audrey Hepburn than a one-time member of the Jackson 5. For another thing, shining shoes is not exclusively a black profession. I know a lot of Italians who shined shoes -- the guy who used to work at the now-defunct shoe repair shop on South George Street, for one -- and that didn't make any of them black, any more than, say, picking fruit makes you a Mexican. And, finally, the fact that his father owned a laundromat in a black neighborhood doesn't make him black. It makes him Korean. These two episodes, breaking in the news within days of one another, are supposed to spark "a national conversation on race," to use a phrase thrown around by a lot of the talking heads on TV. It won't, of course. All it does is provide Republicans and their enablers and remora -- the fish attached to sharks -- with ammunition to shoot off their mouths on cable TV. (Except for Dick Cheney. You give Dick ammunition and a Texas lawyer winds up in the hospital with half of his face shot off.) This kind of nonsense does nothing but reinforce stereotypes -- that Mormons from Nevada are stuck in the 1950s and that Chicago pols ate too many lead paint chips when they were kids. It does nothing to further our national problem with race, the fact that many blacks lack opportunities in education and employment and seem to be mired in poverty. Of course, lots of people lack educational and employment opportunities and are mired in poverty -- not just blacks. There are Hispanic communities with the same issues. There are white communities -- in Appalachia -- with the same issues. There are middle-class white people facing the same problems now that all the good jobs are drying up and the banks want to take their houses back. (For rich white people, everything's fine. Big surprise there.) When it comes to Democrats, saying racially stupid things usually turns out to be just stupidity. Republicans are much better at exploiting racial animus and ignorance for political gain -- from Nixon's Southern Strategy to Reagan's mythical Cadillac-driving welfare mother to Bush the First's Willie Horton to Karl Rove's John McCain-has-an-illegitimate-black-child smear to Trent Lott yearning for the day when black people knew their place to . . . The list goes on and on. The focus on the dumb thing Harry Reid said, and whether he should lose his job over it, is a political side-show, the two-headed goat of our discourse. Blagojevich, on the other hand, is a two-headed goat and has a future in a formaldehyde-filled jar in a musty tent on the Midway. I just read that he's accepted a gig on Donald Trump's reality show, "Celebrity Apprentice." Same thing. Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at [email protected] or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.inyork.com/ydr -- click on the opinion section -- or visit his blog at www.mikeargento.com. To see more of the York Daily Record, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.ydr.com. Copyright (c) 2010, York Daily Record, Pa. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]