My must read of the day is "White House: Scalise as No. 3 says a lot about who GOP is," in the Associated Press:
The White House on Monday waded into a controversy over revelations that the House's No. 3 Republican spoke to a white supremacist group 12 years ago, saying who the GOP has in leadership "says a lot about who they are."
"We've also heard a lot from Republicans particularly over the last few years, including the chairman of the Republican Party, about how Republicans need to broaden their appeal to young people and to women, to gays, and to minorities, that the success of their party will depend on their ability to broaden that outreach," Earnest said. "So it ultimately will be up to individual Republicans in Congress to decide whether or not elevating Mr. Scalise into leadership will effectively reinforce that strategy." […]
Earnest said it's up to Republicans to decide whether he retains his position. "There is no arguing that who Republicans decide to elevate into a leadership position says a lot about what the conference's priorities and values are," Earnest said. […]
The controversy was sparked last week when a liberal Louisiana blogger uncovered Scalise's speech to a 2002 Louisiana convention of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, which called itself EURO. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke founded the group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified as a hate group.
No one with an ounce of sense actually believes that keeping Scalise in leadership is evidence that Republicans don’t care about broadening their appeal and don’t value minorities. What Earnest is saying, in a roundabout way, is that Republicans have Scalise in leadership because they are obviously racists, sexists, bigots, who only care about white men—and that should result in a collective eye roll from anyone capable of thinking.
The logistics alone make that implausible. Twenty-five percent of Americans, or roughly 80 million people, identify as Republicans. There's just no way they're all white supremacists—but Earnest statements, however misguided they may have been, prove what we all know about politics: optics are everything.
Scalise's speech at this event was inexcusable. I find it hard to believe he didn't know where he was speaking—a Louisiana politician would know who David Duke was—but I'll defer you to Matt Bai's column on that and stick to the political optics of it here … This speech is a problem, not because it will sink Scalise’s career, but because it feeds into all of the worst stereotypes of Republicans.
Most Republicans are not racists, but the party's opponents have done a very good job creating a caricature that tells people they probably are. Scalise's speech helps that caricature persist and gives it validity. He won't lose his job over this—and he shouldn't, necessarily—but this misstep is one that will be brought up again and again to keep that superficial caricature alive.