Who You Callin' Boy, Boy?

It happens with unfortunate regularity: some Republican office holder accidentally slips the covers off the latent racism fomenting throughout the party, then quickly tries to apologize and pass it off as an "unwise choice of words."

Which it isn't. Instead, it's an ugly truth.

The latest is GOP Rep. Geoff Davis, from Kentucky, who called Barack Obama "boy" at a fundraiser. "That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," said Davis to his donors, referring to concerns he had about Obama as commander-in-chief with the authority to launch nuclear weapons.

In his "apology," Davis said “[m]y comment… in no way reflects the personal and professional respect I have for you.”

Well, we reckon that's right. Davis's comment instead reflects a rather vicious attitude toward ALL African-Americans, not just Barack Obama. You see, when he's around his GOP buddies and thinks no one is paying attention, Davis evidently feels at liberty to refer to even the most distinguished of African-Americans as a "boy," feeling that his fellow party members will be perfectly comfortable with such talk.

It's one of the reasons Republicans repeatedly fail in their efforts to recruit African-Americans to the GOP, despite some pretty good reasons for many blacks to be disenchanted with the Democrats.

So Davis reminds us of former Senator George Allen and his infamous "macacca" moment, which damaged Allen so badly precisely because it fit perfectly well with what everyone suspected about Allen all along--that he was a blatant racist who generally tried to hide it in his public personna.

For the time being, however, the media still seems far more fascinated with Obama's own slip of the tongue a few days ago, which appears to reveal an elitist tendency in Obama that we all suspected was there despite his roots.

Both incidents offer a cautionary tale to all politicians, who tend to be more relaxed and less careful when addressing a smaller group of their harder-core supporters in a fund-raising setting. Turns out, someone is always listening, waiting for that slip of the tongue that reveals the real person under that big smile and warm handshake.