Here's today's quiz: who is being more presumptuous about someone's political journalism?
1. Someone who sees Gwen Ifill's writing a book called "The Breakthrough" about the "Age of Obama" and suggests it may be favorable to Obama? Or:
2. Gwen Ifill assuming her blogger critics are racists who think black people are trifling failures? And assuming her critics can be compared to terrorists for laughs?
Jeff Poor reported here that Gwen Ifill told a very supportive liberal audience in D.C. that white men like me who raised questions about her work "expect so little of African-Americans. They expect us to fail. They expect us to be trifling. They expect a lot of things -- not everybody but there are those. And that's exactly my point. It's the not everybody, with a very small group of loud people who raise these questions." Then she joked we were terrorists: she refused to change her vice-presidential debate questions, since otherwise "the terrorists would have won."
How on Earth does she know that everyone who raised questions about her hated black people?
She clearly was dead right about one thing. She wasn't spending two seconds thinking about the accuracy of her words about her accusers: "The people who are raising these questions about me have given no thought to this at all, but I didn't really give a lot of thought to them."
So much for the grand and glorious visions of Obama lovers like Joe Klein, who concluded in his Time cover story this week that Obama's trip to George Will's house showed the new age: "It could force everyone to argue more carefully, to think twice before casting aspersions" and create "a less ugly and dangerous world."
Indulge me for a second, and let's recall how we began the Ifill questions at NewsBusters. They revolved around her own words in a promotional YouTube video elaborating on her book's thesis, all about up-and-coming black Democrats (and only Democrats):
In addition to her portrait of Obama, Ifill will also investigate Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, a close friend of Obama's; Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who Ifill describes as "very charismatic" in the video; and Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama. "They all chose to get into politics for the most upstanding of reasons, and they all have achieved much more than their parents could have hoped."
Ifill presents Obama and the others as the idealistic successors of Martin Luther King: "This book is about a generation of people who took seriously the achievements that their parents fought for. They knew that Martin Luther King did what he did so they can do what they’re doing, and they decided to follow through."
The obvious question in all this is whether Ifill is not merely writing about a "breakthrough" for Obama and the new generation of black Democrats, but rooting and wishing and hoping for it.
Ifill also told Howard Kurtz about how our country's "lazy" racial dialogue doesn't acknowledge the "immense accomplishments" of Obama and her other subjects. Is it really journalistically fair or accurate for Ifill to suggest everywhere she goes that her conservative critics did not grasp her book's broader thesis?
Is she wants to embody Obama's new age of civility, Gwen Ifill needs to apologize for remarks like this. I am not a racist, and I am not a terrorist.
