So as the GOP works itself up into ever-higher dudgeon about Reid’s remarks, Democrats are pushing back, aggressively, against his critics. “One thing he’s not going to do is allow Republicans like John Cornyn and Jon Kyl to beat him up over this,” said one source close to Reid’s camp. “You take John Cornyn and Jon Kyl’s NAACP ratings, add them together, spot ‘em 20 points and it still wouldn’t come close to Reid’s.”

Which is true. In 2007-08, the group gave Reid a 90 percent rating, while Cornyn got a 28 and Kyl only a 3. Never, until Reid’s quotes landed in their laps, did the GOP leadership appear to be particularly concerned with scolding politicians who might have offended black voters. Look for Democrats to challenge any Republican who starts calling Reid a racist.

Take Michael Steele, for instance. The Republican National Committee chairman demanded Reid’s resignation this weekend, but as Democrats pointed out, he favored lenience in 2002, when Sen. Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, off-handedly said the country should have elected a segregationist president in 1948. “I know Senator Lott personally and understand him to be compassionate and a tolerant statesman,” Steele said at the time.

The situations aren’t exactly analogous, of course. Reid used painfully antiquated language to talk about why Obama could become the first black president; Lott used no offensive terms, but managed to express a far more inflammatory sentiment. The GOP, though, is trying to equate them as much as possible. And the Democratic pushback isn’t fazing Republicans. “So their argument is that it’s ok to make racially-tinged comments behind closed doors as long as you vote the right way?” said Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the GOP Senate campaign committee. “It just reeks of hypocrisy, particularly in light of the outrage exhibited by Reid and other Democrats in 2002.” Republicans have called just about every Democrat who accepted Reid’s apology this weekend a hypocrite — including Obama, whose reaction to the Lott remarks were blasted around by e-mail by GOP aides on Saturday night.

Still, Democrats don’t seem that nervous about having a debate about which party is more oblivious to the concerns of minority voters. “Race isn’t exactly a great issue for these guys,” the source close to Reid said.

This reaction has nicely illuminated what our press corps is.  The book is little more than royal court gossip, churned out by the leading practitioner of painfully sycophantic, Drudge-mimicking cattiness:  Time‘s Mark Halperin.  And all of the courtiers, courtesans, court spokespeople (i.e., “journalists”) and hangers-on who populate our decadent little Versailles on the Potomac can barely contain their glee over the opportunity to revel in this self-absorbed sleaze.  Virtually every “political news” TV show is hyping it.  D.C. reporters are boasting that they obtained early previews and are excitedly touting how intensively they’re studying its pages in order to identify the most crucial revelations.  Just try to contemplate how things would be if even a fraction of this media energy and interest level were devoted to scrutinizing the non-trivial things political leaders do.

Revealingly, one of the sections receiving the most attention is the microscopic examination of the sexual proclivities of John Edwards, his marital conflicts with his wife, and their various personality flaws.  That reaction is predictable and, obviously, predicted, which is why the lengthy excerpt they released focuses on those matters. Notably, the Edwards scandal was relentlessly pursued and first “broken” by The National Enquirer, and I defy anyone to read the book excerpt on Edwards (to the extent you can even get through it) and identify any differences between the book’s tone, content and “reporting” methods and those found in the Enquirer.  Meanwhile, Matt Drudge — crowned by Halperin and the co-author for his prior book, Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris, as The Ruler of The World of Political Journalists — has been (in return) screamingly promoting the book non-stop for days, as has Drudge’s cloned, adopted child, Politico. 

This is the most revealing aspect of this episode.  The National Enquirer, Matt Drudge and Politico aren’t aberrational extremes in our press corps.  As Halperin and Harris correctly noted in calling Washington journalism “The Freak Show,” they are at its epicenter, leading the way.  The reason there is such a complete merger of interest among low-life tabloids, Matt Drudge, reality shows and the Washington political press corps is precisely because they are indeed indistinguishable — merged.  Even for people who thought that John Edwards’ sexual activities were relevant when he was running for President or vying for a high administration position, at this point he is a completely destroyed, discredited non-entity with no political future, and mucking around in the life of him and his wife is pure sleazy voyeurism.  Subjecting the Edwards to this sort of vicious, judgmental scrutiny is a cost-free activity, which is why so many are so eager to engage in it.

The real value of a book like this lies in the opportunity it presents for Washington’s elite class to distract themselves and everyone else from the oozing corruption, destruction, decaying and pillaging going on — that these same Washington denizens have long enabled.  With some important exceptions, that is the primary purpose of establishment journalism generally.  Even better, the book lets our media and political elite — and then the public generally — feel good about themselves by morally condemning the trashy exploits of Rielle Hunter and the egoistic hypocrisies of the irrelevant John and Elizabeth Edwards.  As The Nation‘s Chris Hayes so perfectly put it:  “Just when you think the news cycle can’t get any stupider, Mark Halperin publishes a book.”  All imperial courts — especially collapsing ones — love to occupy themselves with insular, snotty trivialities.  As this book and the excitement it has produced demonstrates, providing that distraction is exactly what our press corps most loves to do and what it does best.  The media sleazebags who turned Bill Clinton’s penile spots, cigars and semen stains into headline news for two straight years haven’t gone anywhere; they’re actually stronger and more dominant than ever.

As historian, this debate makes me think of older arguments about African American citizenship. During Reconstruction there were well-meaning people who debated whether or not the freed slaves were ready for citizenship. Perhaps they needed more time, more education. By the turn of the twentieth century, black citizenship was being systematically destroyed by disfranchisement, lynching, and racial segregation. African Americans had made dramatic gains in education, and yet their opportunities were eroding. Many had banked on respectability as a political tool and were left disappointed.

I know that politics is an ugly game, that we make quick judgments about candidates based on their height, their looks, and their families. I know that black candidates that look and sound more like a racially neutral “norm” are more easily accepted by white voters. But I am concerned that accepting this as a matter of course degrades the quality of our democracy.

When we privilege a certain set of behaviors and let them serve as springboards for some, they are barriers for others. As an educator, I know that polished language opens doors, but I cringe at the idea that they close doors for others. As an African American historian, I find it horrifying that fair-skinned blacks are seen as more acceptable candidates in the 21st century, and it’s considered just savvy politics to say so.

I do want us to move on from Reid’s comments. It is crucial to get moving on an important political agenda this year. But I also hope that we as Americans move away from narrow, racialized notions about whose voice is valuable and deserves to be heard.

Blair LM Kelley is an associate professor of History at North Carolina State University. Her book “Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson” will be published by UNC Press this spring.

First of all, I’ll share what Reid is quoted as saying. Tangent: I think Heileman and Halperin have probably written an absorbing book (the John Edwards chapter is amazing, and stomach-turning), but if they get dinged for anything, it will be for using a lot of unnamed sources, as well as quoting controversial statements, sometimes firsthand, sometimes with less direct knowledge, in odd sentence fragments. Here’s the Reid section:

“[Reid's] encouragement of Obama was unequivocal. He 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. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.”

It does feel a little silly to be debating objectionable sentence fragments, although a fuller quote of Reid’s remarks might get him in deeper, but there we are.

For Republicans to jump on Reid is both predictable and disgusting. The foolish Michael “Honest Injun” Steele is suggesting that Reid must resign. I think Steele funneled his own book fee to Harper to get them to release “Game Change” this weekend, so the Sunday shows wouldn’t be obsessing over whether and when Steele will resign or be pushed out of his post as RNC chair, for gaffing and overspending his way to shame.

I’m glad to know Steele doesn’t believe there is any kind of black dialect. I guess that’s why he titled his blog “What up?,” told the “Today” show in no uncertain terms “brotha’s still here” and said the Republican Party had to use hip-hop to reach black voters. No stereotyping there!

Meanwhile, Steele and Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl are shrieking “double standard,” comparing Reid’s comments to the stunning 2002 musings of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who had to resign after he said the country would have been better off if it had elected Dixiecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond president in 1948. Oh sure: One guy is talking, perhaps inelegantly, about why he’s wholeheartedly supporting our first black president; the other is wishing the country had elected a racist. That’s exactly the same thing!

But I was a little bit bothered to jump on Twitter today, where my world is very liberal and colorful, and hear some Democrats still trashing Reid for his misstatement. You can read the whole thread here. One person suggested that Reid had no business discussing the issue of whether being light-skinned is an advantage for African-Americans, when that issue is in fact regularly debated in the black community. If we’re ever going to have our long-delayed conversation about race, white people are going to have to be able to participate even on issues that black people have considered their own. I can’t count the number of conversations I had in 2008, with savvy political observers of every race, talking about the advantages of Obama being light-skinned and biracial.

Seriously, does anyone really think it’s coincidence that our first black president is a biracial man who came from Hawaii by way of Harvard  (with a little political rough and tumble in Chicago)? If my thinking that means I can’t be Senate majority leader … well, that’s OK. I didn’t want that job anyway.

Others took issue with the notion of a “Negro dialect,” and while the term “Negro” is passé and the idea that there’s one dialect spoken by all African-Americans is ridiculous, it’s also silly to suggest that there are no words, idioms, sayings or speech patterns common to some or even many African-Americans. During the 1980s, I covered the efforts of some black educators in Oakland, Calif., to get Ebonics designated a language so low-income African-American kids could get English as a second language funding. During the 2008 campaign people noted that not only Obama but Hillary Clinton (with, um, maybe less justification) sounded quite different speaking before black audiences and white ones. Obama is culturally bilingual, and again, if we’re supposed to deny that was an advantage for him, we’re being willfully blind to the realities of politics.

Having a black president means that issues that some black people think can only be discussed in their community are going to come out in the open. For better, or worse, and in this case, I think better. Harry Reid expressed his thoughts inelegantly, he understands that now, and perhaps we’ll retire the term, and the idea of, “Negro dialect.” But if progressive racial-justice Democrats don’t think politicians of every race size up the field in terms of competitive advantage — and sadly, even today, accord advantage to African-Americans who put white folks at ease, speak “white” or “standard” English, and even, yes, look “less non-white” — we’re kidding ourselves.

Besides: We have much bigger problems, as a party and as a nation, than the reasons a powerful 70-year-old white politician endorsed Barack Obama for president. Let’s get serious here.