Guest Post by Kristinn Taylor
Conservatives took the high road this weekend and boy don’t they feel good about themselves.
When MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry gave an emotional preemptive on-air apology Saturday morning to Mitt Romney in advance of his appearance on Fox News Sunday for a segment last weekend using a Christmas family photo that included the Romney family’s recently adopted black infant, conservatives rushed to Twitter to congratulate themselves for quickly accepting an apology that wasn’t meant for them.
Harris-Perry apologized, as she should have, for using a child for a political attack and for hurting the feelings of mixed-race adoptive families. What she should have included in her apology was what the segment was about: a race-baiting attack on Republicans and conservatives.
The failure of conservatives, including Mitt Romney, to push back on this illustrates why, in part, Republicans and conservatives consistently lose racial minority voters.
For decades, liberals have falsely painted Republicans and conservatives as racists. Election after election Republicans and conservative send up candidates who, with rare exception, fail to fight back at such poisonous tactics.
Liberal race-baiting doesn’t just affect politics it affects the culture and nation at large, breeding mistrust and racism where none should exist.
Mitt Romney had a golden opportunity today to call out liberals from Barack Obama and Howard Dean to Melissa Harris-Perry and the whole of MSNBC for smearing Republicans and conservatives as racists. He could have urged soul-searching by liberals to examine how harmful their race-baiting is to American society. Instead, Romney joined Republicans and conservatives in saying we should ‘move on’ and close the book on this episode.
For this Romney is being praised as gracious and “classy”. However, one can graciously accept an apology for a personal affront, but still discuss the bigger picture of liberal race-baiting.
You can’t win the hearts and minds (and votes) of minorities if you constantly allow yourself to be smeared as a racist.
Caleb Howe, writing at the Right Scoop, was one of the few to see the big picture in this incident:
So the only group due an apology yet to hear one, and who will almost certainly never hear one, are Republicans across the nation, who are caricatured and characterized as obviously racist every single day, based solely on their party affiliation. Unfortunately, as we’ll show later today in a follow-up post, the racist assumption about the right crops right back up in Harris-Perry’s show only a few segments after the above clip.
