President Barack Obama’s speech on healthcare last week obviously stirred up some strong feelings among Republicans, most notably from South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson who shouted, “You lie!” as Obama was making the accurate and truthful statement that undocumented immigrants would not receive healthcare benefits under the proposed plan.
Far be it from me to ascribe feelings of racial hostility to Congressman Wilson, but it’s interesting to note the comments he made several years ago when the late Strom Thurmond’s mixed-race daughter finally disclosed that the segregationist South Carolina senator had done the nasty with her African-American mother many years previous.
Here’s how Justin Elliott at TPM reported it:
Flashback to mid-December 2003, when Essie Mae Washington-Williams came forward with the bombshell that she was the illegitimate daughter of the recently-deceased patriarch of South Carolina politics, Sen. Strom Thurmond.
Rep. Wilson, a former page of Thurmond’s, immediately told The State newspaper that he didn’t believe Williams. He deemed the revelation “unseemly.” And he added that even if she was telling the truth, she should have kept the inconvenient facts to herself:
“It’s a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity who has been so loyal to the people of South Carolina,” Wilson said.
Of course, Williams’ story was entirely true — and never really in doubt. Thurmond was 22 and Williams’ mother, a black maid working in his family home, was 16 when Williams was born in 1925. Thurmond supported Williams financially for decades.
The State story continued with Wilson wondering aloud how anyone could dare “diminish” one of his personal heroes.
Wilson said it is unfair to debate rumors about Thurmond when he can no longer defend himself.
The same goes for discussion of an affair Thomas Jefferson is said to have had with a slave.
“Sometimes these things just go on,” Wilson said. “These are heroes of mine. I really hope these would be heroes to future generations of Americans. (The stories) are … a way to diminish their contributions to our country’s existence.”
Six days and several furious letters to the editor later, Wilson was forced to apologize. But, amazingly, he maintained that Williams should not have gone public.
“I have the utmost respect for Essie Mae Washington-Williams and wish her and the Thurmond family all the best,” he said.
Yes, we should never bring up those embarrassing details that illustrate how this blowhard white supremacist was himself prone to getting a little action on the other side of the woodpile. But I digress.
Another interesting — and decidedly more civil — reaction to the president’s healthcare speech came from my colleague Matt Towery, who opined:
With your obsession over health care reform, you and your administration are more and more looking at least as out of touch with voters as the Bush team was. We’re still suffering severe economic doldrums, yet you’ve soldiered on with a speech about health care to a joint session of Congress. That issue is near the bottom of the list of things most Americans are now fretting about. It’s hard to get excited about the expansion of government when most people don’t think that government does a satisfactory job of the many tasks it already handles . . .
Months ago, I wrote that economic recovery would come sooner than most expect. A look at early September’s stock market backs up that claim. But with credit too tight, consumers unwilling and unable to spend, a looming final implosion in commercial real estate, and an international community that now sees our government spending and debt as a threat to the global economy, I have to say my optimism is gone.
Mr. President, your speech to Congress should have been about issues other than health care. You now have little time to retool your perspective and agenda. The issues I’ve listed above are a serious threat to the success of your presidency and the future of our nation.
That’s all well and good, Matt, but since you claim to do some polling these days you might want to look at the numbers from organizations that, you know, conduct polls.
A national tracking poll by Research 2000 that covered the two days after Obama’s speech on healthcare showed that the president’s approval numbers had been boosted: his standing the week before the speech was 52 percent favorable to 43 percent unfavorable, a 9-point margin. That changed to 56 percent favorable, 39 percent unfavorable after the speech, a 17-point margin.
CBS reinterviewed people they had polled the week before the speech and found that the net approval of Obama on the healthcare issue moved from a negative margin of 7 percentage points (40/47) to a positive margin of 14 percentage points (52/38).
Leave a Reply