Quote of the Day

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same [surge in right-wing anger and extremism]. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that [openly gay Barney] Frank, [civil rights hero John] Lewis and [black representative from Missouri, Emanuel] Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. . . . By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

– Frank Rich
“The Rage is Not About Health Care”
The New York Times
March 27, 2010

See also the previous Wild Reed post:
It’s Still Out There
Frank Rich on the “Historic Turning Point in the Demise of America’s Anti-gay Movement”