JURISPRUDENCE
Pin the Tail On the Victim
So what is the statute of limitations on stupid, insensitive comments?
I don't ask this as a legal question so much as a practical one. In the past week, Americans have proved yet again their simultaneous inclination to punish politicians for politically incorrect remarks and -- almost as readily -- to forgive them. It's widely accepted that George Allen, Virginia's soon-to-be former senator, derailed not only his reelection bid but also his possible 2008 presidential candidacy with a single seemingly racist "macaca" moment in August. Yet last week also saw GOP senators proudly hand the position of minority whip to Trent Lott. He's the same Mississippi senator they only recently renounced for the remarkable 2002 assertion that the nation would be a better place had it only elected Strom Thurmond -- the then-segregationist Dixiecrat-- in the 1948 presidential contest.
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Are slurs against East Indians somehow worse than slurs against African Americans? Are Republican senators more tone-deaf than the American electorate? Or are we just so in love with the idea of second acts in American politics that we will forgive just about any comment with the passage of time?
I heard my fair share of radio shows last month in which callers and guests opined on whether Allen's alleged racism was counterbalanced by his opponent Jim Webb's alleged sexism. After much analysis, I can only suggest that the unit of measurement they all utilized was some diffuse algorithm of outrage, in which the status of the minority demeaned is multiplied by the unit of public repentance expressed by the speaker, divided by the time elapsed since the incident, all divided then again by some inchoate unit of "redemption" experienced by the speaker.
How else can we explain an American polity horrified when Rush Limbaugh mocked Parkinson's sufferer Michael J. Fox last month, yet willing to look past a Senate ad campaign that cast black Democrat Harold E. Ford Jr. as a masher who preys on white women? How else can we parse the linguistic soup of redemption, forgiveness and time elapsed ladled out last week by Lott's GOP supporters: "He paid a pretty high price for the statement he made," said Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), adding, "We all believe in redemption. . . . Thank God." Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) offered a variation on that theme: "He apologized, and he paid a serious price for it."
Initially, the redemption-comes-with-time explanation sounds like the best one: It assumes that the quick judgments of the American people are tempered by a longer-term optimism, a sunny willingness to believe the best of everyone in the end. But history suggests otherwise. In 2004, Sen. John F. Kerry was, after all, "Swift-boated" for alleged conduct decades earlier. Many Virginians were convinced of Webb's alleged sexism -- by a 1979 magazine article he'd penned, titled "Women Can't Fight."
Time clearly does not heal all wounds. American voters' judgments seem to be anchored in some subtler calculation about "character." Allen's ship wasn't so much sunk by the macaca comment as it was doomed by the mountain of other evidence it exposed: the Confederate flag; the inexplicable noose; the testimony of college friends; the inability to talk about his Jewish heritage in a positive way. At some point, Allen, unlike Lott, started to look less like a one-time malaprop than a bigot. And unlike Mel Gibson -- able to claim that alcohol made him do it -- Allen failed to establish himself as a credible victim of anything.
Certainly, he tried. Allen made a halfhearted last-ditch effort to claim that he was the victim of liberal media bias. But no one seemed to buy it this time. They may in 2008. In the end, the time may pass not for healing but to allow Allen a chance to cast himself as the wounded. So he may well be redeemed in two years.
Lott achieved his own redemption last week, at least in part, by portraying himself as the oppressed rather than the oppressor. In his book, "Herding Cats: A Life in Politics," published last year, Lott explains that he was the victim in the Thurmond birthday incident, as his mere "slip of the tongue" led to a betrayal by the Bush administration, an opportunistic Bill Frist and his Senate colleagues. "I'd been knifed in the back," he writes, and four years later, his colleagues seem to agree that he has suffered enough. We have come to believe that simply paying a price for a hurtful comment is enough for redemption.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich characterized these recent elections as a triumph for civility in American discourse, "a decisive 'no' to the politics of 'macaca' " and a "stake in . . . the heart of our political darkness." I wish I could share his optimism. I don't believe that our current politics reflect a great surge of public support for the victims of hateful speech -- whether they are immigrants or homosexuals or racial minorities. I think we are engaged, instead, in a more subtle, and more insidious, collective sifting and sorting of which alleged victims merit our support and which alleged victims warrant our forgiveness. Lott is to be forgiven, Allen is not (yet). Kerry is forgiven for the Swift boats, but not for the botched joke.
Public opinion now turns on which of our leaders makes the best case for having been persecuted, and which has most effectively used the words "I've suffered" as a substitute for "I'm sorry."
Perhaps this great national game of pin the tail on the victim is truly the best we can do in evaluating the "character" of our leaders. In an era in which every gaffe and blunder is recorded for eternity on YouTube, who among us is really fit to judge whether Lott or Allen is a racist? And who can decide whether the former racists have been reformed and redeemed?
Perhaps this is just too old-fashioned, but I wonder if we could agree that at least part of a person's character can be measured by his ability to say, "I am sorry. I was wrong," as opposed to "I am sorry you victimized me."
Dahlia Lithwick covers legal affairs for Slate, the online magazine at www.slate.com.
