Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams at the 2008 GOP Texas State Convention
“Let’s talk about race,” wrote Michael Williams.
It was September 22, six days after former President Jimmy Carter suggested that race was one reason for the special political animosity toward President Barack Obama. Williams, the four-term Texas railroad commissioner–a job, he tells everyone, that has everything to do with energy policy and nothing to do with railroads–had already dinged Carter for the remarks. But in a long blog post at his campaign website, Williams went further.
Image by: Matt Mahurin
“As an African-American son of the South,” wrote Williams, “I grew up in a time and place where you didn’t have to divine intent or deconstruct code words to find racism.” The crisis in America, he explained, was the proliferation of people calling one another “racists” for their position on Obama’s policies. “We have rid our institutions of government of the practice of discrimination; if only we could rid our political discourse of the ugliness that ensues when we ascribe discriminatory motive to statements with no obvious discriminatory aspect.”
There was a nuts-and-bolts political point to this. Williams is one of the nation’s very few African-American Republicans who hold statewide office. He’s running for the U.S. Senate seat expected to be vacated by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), a candidate for governor that year. If elected, he would be the only African-American member of the Senate, as the appointed and scandal-plagued Democrat Roland Burris is retiring next year. That means Williams is threatening to jump out of obscurity and into the position of a credible, high-profile critic of Obama.
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