“Is Kerry’s Campaign Colorblind?”

… asked Colbert King, the Deputy Editor of the Washington Post‘s editorial page, in his regular column today.

Lest you be confused, you should understand that for King, who writes most of the time about matters of race, “colorblind” is an epithet, not an ecomium, which leads to this introductory lamentation: “John Kerry, oh, John Kerry, say it isn’t so. But, alas, apparently ’tis true.”

King’s complaint is that Kerry and his inner circle don’t look like America, and he doesn’t mean they look French. He means they look white.

The Massachusetts senator, putative 2004 Democratic standard-bearer and soon-to-be leader of the party that most voting African Americans and other people of color call home, has an innermost circle of advisers that is practically as white as the driven snow….

… Kerry has no person of color in his inner circle, including the campaign manager, campaign chairperson, media adviser, policy director, foreign policy adviser, general election manager, convention planner, national finance chairman and head of the vice presidential search team.

I assume that King does not believe Kerry is a racist, or even that he discriminated in picking his inner circle. I assume that he does believe Kerry was, as he derisvely implies, “colorblind,” that he selected his closest confidants, as the old phrase has it, “without regard to race.” That, of course, according to today’s civil rights dogma, is a no-no.

Since the inner circlists were all selected without regard to race, King quite obviously believes that one or more of them should have been de-selected because of his or her race and one or more darker-hued alternatives selected because of his, her, or their race.

And what does the Kerry campaign itself say of the pure as the driven snow whiteness of its inner circle? King asked Stephanie Cutter, Kerry’s press spokesperson, and got what is rapidly becoming a trademark Democratic response to difficult questions.

It all depends, she said, on what you mean by inner circle.