The 'Palin = racist' smear

It's been an eventful few weeks. While ordinary Americans camped out overnight in the freezing cold for a place in line at her book tour stops, liberal America has been busy throwing whatever dirt it could find at the one person they fear could derail the Obama project in 2012. Andrew Sullivan went into a Trigtruther spasm with Joy Behar, and Palin-stalker Joe McGinniss tried to get her convicted for using a private jet to fly from Florida to Washington. Even Andree McLeod chipped in by filing another handful of ethics complaints.

The race hustlers were at it too. Since the election of Barack Obama, America is supposed to be a post-racial country, but that didn't stop them from twisting a seemingly innocent statement by Chuck Heath about his daughter's time in Hawaii and presenting it as evidence that the Governor was somehow deeply racist. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, for example, used his platform on the Huffington Post to convict her of "an uncomfortable racism".

For those of you who don't know him: Hutchinson has form on Palin-bashing. He's the same guy who tried to stir up the "Palin didn't want to hire African Americans" story during last year's election campaign. A bogus claim, as the Governor's spokeswoman explained at the time:

Sharon Leighow, communications spokesperson in the Alaska governor’s office, disputed the allegation. She said that Palin’s press secretary was part African-American and that two of her senior advisors were Filipino and Korean. Leighow was also adamant that Palin did not hire staff persons based on color, but solely on talent and skill. As she put it, “Governor Palin is totally color-blind.”

During that same period, Hutchinson also dismissed Todd Palin as "no poster boy for Yup'ik Eskimo's or other Native Alaskans" - an echo of the infamous 'Palin's greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she's a woman' statement by militant feminist Wendy Doniger.

Now he's at it again, suggesting that Palin transferred from Hawaii to Idaho because unlike the multicultural Aloha State, Idaho is "mostly white, rural, hardline conservative... a fertile nesting ground for an assorted array of kooky, far out racist paramilitary groups."

Whatever.

I'm going to make a radical suggestion here: let's look at what the Governor herself has to say about this episode. We turn to Going Rogue, page 42:

I kicked off college by taking a semester to thaw out; along with Tilly and two other girlfriends, we flew to Hawaii for our freshman year of college. Our intention was to play basketball there, but we made it to only a few tryouts and then decided we’d better concentrate on our studies . . . and the beach. It turned out that Hawaii was a little too perfect. Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls. Besides, we were homesick for mountains, cooler seasons, and even snow. After that first semester, we realized we’d better transfer back to something closer to our own reality so we could actually earn our degrees.

Tilly and I packed up for a more conventional and affordable campus, choosing Idaho because it was much like Alaska yet still let us be “Outside” (Alaskans’ alternate term for the Lower 48).

Basically, Palin says she couldn't really afford life on the beach, and she was homesick - homesick for the mountains, and for the cooler Alaska clime. By the way, that's the same explanation given by the Governor's friend mentioned in the quote above, Kim 'Tilly' Ketchum, in a 2008 interview with the LA Times:

"When you're used to having some cooler weather, you get tired of the heat," Ketchum said. "We went one semester there before we realized we needed to go someplace else."

They discovered to their shock and amazement that they were cold climate people who couldn't really handle the sunshine, and decided to transfer to northern, mountainous Idaho. Big deal, huh?

Obviously, this doesn't stop Hutchinson from laying out a series of racism charges, some all too familiar (the 'Gov. Palin didn't want to hire African-Americans' canard, and the 'Palin's white support base is a bastion of latent racism' meme that Chris Matthews has been promoting during the book tour), some completely bizarre. He suggests, for example, that during the campaign both Palin and her office were "mute" on a number of racist emails sent by Alaska state employees. Could that be because the emails in question weren't actually sent until after the election? Sure seems a reasonable explanation to me. Palin's spokesman Bill McAllister did comment on the emails, by the way, stating that "this is a confidential personnel and disciplinary matter that has nothing to do with the governor's office."

Enough already with the race hustling. Palin's words and actions speak for themselves. She hired African-Americans and Asian-Americans not because of some politically correct urge to fill an Earl Ofari Hutchinson approved quota but because they were simply the best people for the job. She also married a man who is half Yupik eskimo. In her book, she proudly speaks of her daughters as the next in line of a series of "beautiful Yupik women". It may not be enough to convince Hutchinson, but it's enough for normal, sane Americans to see that these "Palin = racist" stories are just a bunch of politically motivated baloney.