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According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s Game Change, back in 2006 Harry Reid “was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that 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,’ as he said privately.” Last night I tweeted Mark Kleiman’s response to this, but today I see that not only has this non-story not disappeared, it’s actually getting more attention from our stalwart media titans. So here’s Mark:

Other than using an old-fashioned word to refer to African-Americans (a word which was the standard word for about the first half of Reid’s life), what did Reid do wrong?

It is the case that Obama is light-skinned and that he is a native speaker of American English, though he can and does, on occasion, use Ebonic cadences for rhetorical effect. And it is the case that both his skin tone (and the ancestry it reflects) and his command of the common dialect are among his political assets. If he had looked, or sounded, like Jesse Jackson, he wouldn’t be President. A darker hue and a more Ebonic speech pattern would certainly have cost him some votes among white Anglos, Latinos, and Asians, and almost certainly cost him some black votes as well.  (The internalization of racism in the African-American community is a well-known phenomenon.)

It would have been insane for anyone considering an Obama candidacy not to weigh those factors.  In October of 2008, when the dark-skinned, Ebonic-speaking David Alan Grier, on “Chocolate News,” urged white voters to “vote for the white half,” he was repeating a joke I’d heard at least a year earlier.

This whole thing is ridiculous. That Reid immediately apologized and Obama immediately accepted his apology isn’t surprising. It’s all part of the kabuki of American politics. Nor is it surprising that buffoonish attack dogs like Liz Cheney and Michael Steele are trying to pretend Reid is some kind of stone racist. But Reid was speaking privately, he was a political pro talking about Obama’s electability, and he didn’t say anything offensive anyway. Are we seriously at the point where we have to rely on George Will (!) to talk sense into the conservative movement?

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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