Are tea parties racist? Sifting through the anti-Obama-hysteria hysteria.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Barack Obama - Viewpoint essay

IN RETROSPECT, I suppose I should be surprised it took as long as eight months for someone to accuse me of racism in my criticism of Barack Obama. After all, by September 11, when Salon Editor in Chief Joan Walsh wrote that my "strange slur" against the president was a textbook example of "the racial nuttiness that Obama faces," just about every person loudly opposing the administration's economic policies had already been tarred with the same brush.

It started in early August, as members of Congress began facing their unusually restive constituents in a series of town hall meetings. New York Times columnist Patti Krugman, citing not one shred of contemporary sociological evidence, asserted that "the driving force behind the town hall mobs" is "cultural and racial anxiety" on the part of the "angry white voter." Within a month, that bit of omniscient whitey baiting was perilously close to conventional wisdom.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne warned that the town hall protests exemplified "the politics of the jackboot,' comparing them directly to "lynching" and concluding that "it is profoundly troubling that firearms should begin to appear with some frequency at a president's public events only now, when the president is black" (There have been exactly two Obama appearances at which protesters outside the venue openly carried handguns. In both cases the acts were legal, and in one of them the gun-toting protesters included a black man.)

After Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouted "You lie!" during Obama's September 9 address to Congress, Krugman's page mate Maureen Dowd wrote, "Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it" She added, "Fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!"

Generally speaking, when key evidence is "unspoken," and in fact imagined by the prosecution, it's a good bet that the overall case is weak. The same goes for relying on explanatory sociology dating from the early 1960s. During the summer, racism baiters such as New York Times columnist Frank Rich ("the atmosphere keeps getting darker"), Newsweek's Susan Jacoby ("This toxic brew of racism and class resentment is rooted in anti-rationalism"), and Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez ("the first black president, as well as the deep economic recession, have challenged Americans' sense of self") cited the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter's famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"...