Palin Trumps Race Card

Ever since the dawn of time--well the 1960s, anyway--Democrats have been playing race cards from the bottom of the deck in the national game of bridge. And they have won rubber after rubber with their cheating.

Yesterday, July 13, for instance, the NAACP played the race card on the Tea Party, passing a resolution accusing it of tolerating bigotry. No doubt they expected Tea Parties to scurry and hide under rocks, as people usually do when accused of racism.

But today, July 14, 2010, is a day that will live... Well, it will mark the turning point on race.

Today Sarah Palin used her Facebook page to blast the NAACP and its resolution.

I am saddened by the NAACP’s claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America’s Constitutional rights are somehow “racists.”

Then off she goes, talking about a nuisance suit she just won over a "spurious charge of racism," Tim Scott, "poised to become the first African-American Republican Congressman from the former Confederacy since Reconstruction", and Todd's Yupak Eskimo family. Wow. Seems to me that Palin had a few shells in the ready-use locker and was just waiting for this opportunity.

Now, I'd say, the boot is on the other foot and a shocked NAACP is finding itself on the defensive.

It has taken a while, but liberal commentators like Michelle Cottle of The New Republic are beginning to acknowledge that Sarah Palin is an extraordinary political talent. There's a reason for this, of course. Palin has come up the hard way in politics, starting out as a city councilwoman in 1992. If she weren't good we wouldn't know about her.

Who could blame the white Tea Partiers if the race-card argument were true? Ordinary middle-class whites, as I blogged yesterday, are the chaps that the political elite has forced to pay for its race-based affirmative action programs. If lower-income whites (who have nine-to-one odds against admission to selective colleges compared to lower-income blacks) were the darlings of the liberals, as they were in the 1930s, they would be in the streets, led by the liberals, demanding justice.

Instead lower-income whites have borne the insults of an overweening elite for nearly two generations. Finally they have taken to the streets. It is not over race, but over the simple idea of freedom and out-of-control government debt. As Sarah Palin writes, Tea Partiers are people

who simply want government to abide by our Constitution, live within its means, and not borrow and spend away our children’s futures.

Yeah. That just proves they are racists.

Meanwhile Sarah Palin has scored a hit, a palpable hit.