Even allies wince at King's race remarks

WASHINGTON — It’s not unusual to see Democrats and the liberal blogosphere react with outrage to comments by Rep. Steve King, an outspoken conservative Republican from western Iowa.

But King’s remarks this week about President Barack Obama and race have prompted even some of King’s allies to turn on him.
A GOP candidate from Colorado canceled a fundraiser where King had been scheduled to give the keynote speech, and his appearance at a tea party event in Colorado was also canceled.

King has built a national profile based in part on his strong views regarding immigration, and he is known for making incendiary remarks on that issue and others, including Abu Ghraib and the war in Iraq.

The latest controversy came when King criticized Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, who also is black, in an interview Monday on G. Gordon Liddy’s nationally syndicated radio talk show.

“I’m offended by Eric Holder and the president also, their posture,” said King, 61. “It looks like Eric Holder said that white people in America are cowards when it comes to race.”

King continued: “The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person in the case of professor Gates and officer Crowley.”

He was alluding to last year’s incident in which Obama commented on Police Sgt. James Crowley’s arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates. Gates is black, Crowley white.

Holder, in a 2009 speech, did not suggest that whites are more cowardly than blacks when discussing race, as King indicated in the radio interview.

“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” Holder said, “in things racial we have always been, and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

In an interview Tuesday, King stood by his radio show comments and said he’s no coward when it comes to talking about race.

“I think we should talk about it. I did talk about it. Now, it seems as though there’s a controversy and allegations have been made about me, but not one individual from the left has sought to try to challenge the argument that I’ve made, not one,” King told the World-Herald. “They just simply call names.”

As news of King’s remarks spread, Republican House candidate Cory Gardner of Colorado canceled a $100-per-plate fundraiser where King was to speak. The Fort Collins Coloradan newspaper reported that the Northern Colorado Tea Party also canceled King’s appearance at a weekend event in Loveland.

“I was pretty disappointed when I heard his comments,” said Lesley Hollywood, director of the Northern Colorado Tea Party. “What he said doesn’t fit in with tea party values, particularly in northern Colorado.”

King said that the controversy over his comments had been drummed up by liberal activists and that he was surprised both the Gardner campaign and the local tea party leadership “caved” in the face of that controversy.

“That’s not the kind of people I want guarding my back,” King said.

Christopher Reed, an Iowa conservative activist, defended King. “He is one of those few politicians who really says what he thinks.”
King has spoken at numerous tea party rallies, including one in Washington in April. King was introduced to the enthusiastic crowd as a “tea partier on the inside” and a congressman who is “tea party tested and tea party approved.”

He also hung one of the “Don’t Tread On Me” flags popular among tea party regulars outside his Capitol Hill office. He said at the time that the flag has become “the symbol of taking our country back.”

Obama and race also were mentioned in a speech made last month by King.

“When he had an Irish cop and a black professor, who’d he side with?” King asked. “He jumped to a conclusion without having heard the facts. And he ended up having to have a beer summit.

“The president of the United States has got to articulate a mission. And instead, he’s playing race-bait games to undermine the law enforcement in the state of Arizona and across the country.”

The tea party’s rebuke made King’s recent Obama-and-race comments stand out, but King often makes comments that put him in the spotlight. In the same 24-hour period, the four-term lawmaker and former construction company owner delivered these attention-grabbers:

•   He offered a defense Monday of the recent shooting of a 15-year-old Mexican boy by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. “When faced with a life-threatening situation, this agent appears to have responded to lethal force with lethal force as authorized,” King said. (There were reports that boys were throwing rocks at agents.) “But this incident could have been avoided if the administration had lived up to its responsibility under the ‘Secure Fence Act’ to build fences on our border.”

•   King released a letter Monday in which he wrote that Zeituni Onyango, Obama’s aunt who was recently granted asylum in the United States, should testify at a congressional hearing. “In order to better determine whether favoritism played a role — especially because Ms. Onyango had been earlier turned down for asylum and ordered deported in 2004 before her nephew became president — the subcommittee needs to hear from Ms. Onyango herself,” King wrote.

Monday night, King gave a House floor speech regarding concerns that a new immigration law in Arizona will lead to racial profiling. “Profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement,” King said. “If you can’t profile someone, you can’t use those common-sense indicators that are before your very eyes.

“Now, I think it’s wrong to use racial profiling for the reasons of discriminating against people, but it’s not wrong to use race or other indicators for the sake of identifying people that are violating the law.”

King noted that a cabdriver earlier in the day assumed that he needed a ride because he was walking out of a government building and wearing a suit.

“It’s just a common-sense thing,” King said. “Law enforcement needs to use common-sense indicators.

“Those common-sense indicators are all kinds of things, from what kind of clothes people wear, my suit in my case; what kind of shoes people wear; what kind of (accent) they have; the type of grooming that they might have. There are all kinds of indicators there, and sometimes it’s just a sixth sense and they can’t put their finger on it.

“But these law enforcement officers, if they were going to be discriminating against people on the sole basis of race, singling people out, that’d be going on already.”

This report includes material from the Associated Press.

Contact the writer:
202-662-7270, joe.morton@owh.com

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