Idiot Reporter Asks David Duke to Weigh In on Concept of a Black President

Posted by Steven Reynolds, The All Spin Zone at 6:24 AM on February 27, 2008.

Michael Crawley of the New Republic called up David Duke to ask him his opinion on a Presidential race that just might bring us an African-American President. Yeah, he called David Duke, who claimed to be somewhere in Europe at the time, and was using secret email addresses. This is supposed to be of some import?

The content of this interview with David Duke on the prospects of Barack Obama, a potential Obama Presidency and its effect on America. . . the contents of the interview are pretty luke warm. I'm thinking those contents are so luke warm as to be a waste of bandwidth on the innertube. Well, it would be a complete waste, since there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of animus against Mr. Obama in the fringe white supremacist groups surveyed by Mr. Crawley. Here's how Crawley describes Duke's reaction to the Obama candidacy in the New Republic:

Yet, far from railing at Obama's rise, Duke seems almost nonchalant about it. Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explained cordially, "don't see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton-or, for that matter, John McCain." Sure, Duke considers Obama "a racist individual," citing his Afrocentric Chicago church. But soon the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People was critiquing Obama as overhyped and insubstantial in terms you might hear from, say, Clinton strategist Mark Penn. "They say he's for change. What change? He's become almost a cult figure. I don't see any shining light around Obama's head. I don't see any halos," Duke said.

Crawley couldn't get a story out of Duke that was incendiary enough when he asked about Obama. No frothing and no death threats. The story just wasn't scary enough, eh? Dig a little deeper and he got another nice angle, I suppose, that racists of the David Duke ilk are noting the supposed significance of Jewish advisors of Barack Obama. But let's be clear. That is not news. The twisted rhetorical strategy of the DAvid Duke types have always ended their winding road by blaming Jews for everything. NOT NEWS! So why give the guy print space in a major publication?

Michael Crawley evidently couldn't even figure out who David Duke was. He introduces Duke to his readers as the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People. That's true. It is also true that the organization appears defunct. One of those internet URL speculator firms is in control of the www.naawp.com web site, trying to trick naive racists into shopping through their links (network solutions ought to be ashamed to have ANY content on that site, much less content that pretends to be white supremacist). The ADL notes that Duke is a founder of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, and that he's very popular among the racist groups in Eastern Europe and Russia. Yeah, you can find Duke on that web site, but note this: he's distanced himself from American life. Look at his writings and you'll see he's just no longer interested in America, because he's got groups adoring him in Eastern Europe. David Duke goes where the money is, but here in the US David Duke is a non-factor.

Why write about a non-factor, especially one known as a source of racial hate, if the only result is giving the guy a bit of publicity. That's the case here. This is just a bunch of wanking, and it's such an empty article one's gotta figure it was assigned by the editors, because the only way to make this readable would have been to make a satire of it, and Crawley passed up that strategy. Yeah, the only way to make this thing interesting would be to make it an "In search of" piece, preferably with a Hunter Thompson flavor.

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Tagged as: racism, duke, obama

Steven Reynolds is a regular blogger for the All Spin Zone