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Echoing a statement released on his Twitter account earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid need not resign over a statement regarding President Barack Obama’s race, only “confess to hypocrisy and move on.”
U.S. Rep. Steve King
Reid is facing calls from Republicans to step down for his comments regarding then-candidate Barack Obama revealed in a book chronicling the 2008 campaign. According to the book, Reid said the country “was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’”
Many Republicans point to Reid’s criticism of then Republican Senate Leader Trent Lott in 2002 as reason for Reid to resign. Lott got himself in hot water by telling a crowd that a Strom Thurmond presidency would have prevented “all these problems over all these years.” Thurmond had based his presidential campaign largely on an explicit racial segregation platform.
King said in an interview with The Talk Radio News Service that he has no problem with what Reid said, since it was the truth.
“Did anybody ask the question ‘Did he tell the truth?’ Was what he said objective truth or was it an opinion?” King said. “He essentially said that President Obama is light skinned and doesn’t have an accent unless he wants one. That seems to be true to me, although I’ve never heard him with an accent of any kind.”
His problem is that Reid called on Lott to resign, so that standard should be applied to Reid.
“He should be held accountable for hypocrisy,” King said. “But not for what he said.”
King seemed to take the most offense to statements made in Reid’s defense by the Rev. Al Sharpton, saying the Civil Rights leader was able to defend Reid and not Lott because “Harry Reid has a long record of promoting Civil Rights.”
“So therefore you couldn’t call Harry Reid a racist for making a statement that was a little out of taste,” King said. “But they would argue that Trent Lott has not jumped on all the Affirmative Action agendas apparently that Harry Reid has, so therefore you can label him a racist with a clear conscience. That’s an abhorrent philosophy to me. That you can declare someone to be a racist because somehow Al Sharpton or anyone else can divine within the words spoken or the tone or the inflection or what’s not spoken that someone is a racist.”
But as The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel pointed out, the difference between Reid and Lott’s comments goes much deeper than King suggests.
When Lott made his remarks – unlike Reid, he did it in front of video cameras – he added that a Thurmond presidency would have prevented “all these problems over all these years.” Lott’s office was unable to explain what “all these problems” were. In the following days, two more instances of Lott waxing nostalgiac about Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 presidential bid surfaced. By comparison, Republicans like [RNC Chairman Michael] Steele have not produced more evidence of Reid racial slip-ups, focusing instead on his hypocrisy for criticizing Lott in 2002.
Here is King’s interview with The Talk Radio News Service:
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