I’ve spent many years, decades even, charting the impact of race on American society and politics. I do believe, despite cyclical ups and downs, the United States is becoming a more open and free society. But I also see a current countervailing dismissal of basic evidence that many Americans cling to beliefs about racial superiority. For example, Andrew Sullivan, who I generally find a thinking man, recently made a point of defending the right to defend the discredited science of The Bell Curve, as if that made him a maverick instead of a racial Luddite. No one wants to say to a broad audience that black people, brown people, or immigrants are inherently bad or stupid — just that exploring the topic is a worthy pursuit. It’s a fig leaf of the driest sort, a plea for attention that relies on underlying myths of superiority to drive web traffic and speaking fees.

Having spent my time as a reporter with paler people who ran early meth labs and Klan-folk as well as more melanin-enhanced drug dealers and charlatans; plus shady government officials of multiple ethnicities, I can tell you what you probably know — corruption and moral turpitude comes in all colors. But fear-mongering about the darker races is embedded in our political code, from slavery to Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era to today.

So why are people so surprised that Presidential candidate Ron Paul’s previous newsletters leveraged the power of xenophobia? Today the New York Times published an editorial stating:

[Paul] has failed to convincingly repudiate racist remarks that were published under his name for years — or the enthusiastic support he is getting from racist groups. Mr. Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas who is doing particularly well in Iowa’s precaucus polls, published several newsletters in the ’80s and ’90s with names like the Ron Paul Survival Report and the Ron Paul Political Report. The newsletters interspersed libertarian political and investment commentary with racial bigotry, anti-Semitism and far-right paranoia.

This isn’t new information, but only now — as Paul nudges against Romney in the pre-Iowa Caucus polls — are people paying attention. The Times lays out the case for Paul to be accountable for newsletter statements thus:

A direct-mail ad for the newsletters from around 1993 warned of a “coming race war in our big cities” and said there was a “federal-homosexual cover-up” to suppress the impact of AIDS…. When the newsletters first became an issue during his Congressional campaigns in the 1990s, however, he did not deny writing some of them or knowing about them. Mr. Paul has never given a full and detailed accounting of who wrote the newsletters and what his role was in overseeing their publication…. [M]embers of the white nationalist Web site Stormfront are volunteering for the Paul campaign, along with far-right militias, survivalists and anti-Zionist groups. Don Black, the Stormfront director, said his members were drawn to Mr. Paul by the newsletters and his positions against immigration and the Fed (run by Jews, Mr. Black said), even if Mr. Paul were not himself a white nationalist.

The political mainstream didn’t take Ron Paul’s candidacy seriously until his poll numbers in Iowa became undeniably strong. The Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary put their own special mockery on early inclusion in the political process by a broad spectrum of Americans. We say our system is representative democracy, but Iowa and New Hampshire — states I’ve visited both in and out of the political season; and states I celebrate for their own culture and gifts — are much more rural, white, and conservative than America as a whole. Rather than focusing on Paul’s use of race as a tool to manipulate supporters, I’d like us to take a closer look at the nomination system. We need to make a compelling case for reconstructing the primary system to rotate first dibs among states, or to, if anything, steer first primary and caucus rights to swing states like Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wisconsin or North Carolina.

The biggest problem with the primary season is not a question of outliers. (Although Ron Paul is strong now, as a factor of organization and social media, he is very much an outlier in the overall race). We have to return to the question of why we continue to favor a nominating process that does not do America justice. Iowa and New Hampshire historically are first-dibs states in the Presidential selection process, but history alone does not justify a continuation of practice, no more than the U.S. should have clung to its history of excluding non-landowners, non-whites, and women from voting.

Why does the racial agitation in Ron Paul’s old newsletters matter? To me, mainly because it shows the way that a couple of states with an unfair historical advantage can be manipulated by a well-organized system of supporters. Instead of setting the dogs to sniff out Paul’s own racial leanings, we should question the larger system at hand.

Columnist and radio host Matt Miller’s “No Way to Pick a President” puts it this way:

The far-right tilt of this band of atypical Americans forces Republican candidates to disavow ideas that might make them attractive leaders to the rest of us. Take Mitt Romney’s infamous (and unconvincing) contortions regarding his path-breaking health reform in Massachusetts….. It’s bizarre. As was Newt Gingrich’s related “transgression” Tuesday — when old newsletters from his health-care institute were found to have hailed Romneycare when it passed…. Then there’s Rick Perry, who proclaimed Tuesday that he had undergone a “transformation” on abortion and now believes (contrary to his long-standing position) that there should be no exceptions for rape, incest or saving the life of the mother….. Another day, another Iowa-induced pander.

The Iowa Caucuses have preceded the New Hampshire primary since 1972. The New Hampshire Primary led the nation starting in 1920. This is not Constitutional law. It’s time for a change. The attention paid to Ron Paul’s mysteriously racist newsletters, which, regardless of his views, have been a successful brand-building ploy, should be redirected to the process at large.

Tags: fake, Iowa Caucus, racist, Ron Paul