Jon Henke at Q&O attacks my post on the ugly racial history of George Allen, a Republican senator and 2008 presidential contender:

I’ll ask Brendan: do you actually believe George Allen to be racist? Specifically:

• Are you alleging that the noose in his office was a reflection of Allen’s feelings about black people, as opposed to being part of a western and/or legal motif?
• Are you alleging that the Confederate flag was a specific reflection of Allen’s racism, rather than an innocuous part of a flag collection?
• How should a Southern State — the “Capital of the Confederacy” — formally remember its history? Can a Virginia Governor recognize Confederate History without being racist, or is there nothing but slavery to Confederate History?

The answers to these questions all appear in my original post, but I’ll walk Henke back through them from the sake of clarity.

On the subject of whether I’m claiming Allen is a racist, let me quote from the original post:

Despite reader claims to the contrary, I’m not saying Allen is a racist — I have no way of knowing what his private thoughts are. I can only judge him on his public actions and statements, and that record is troubling at best.

On the subject of the noose, again, I don’t know that it reflects Allen’s feelings about black people, but, as I wrote, “if the noose ‘has nothing to do with lynching,’ why was it hung from a tree? The symbolism seems obvious. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it in 2000, the noose was ‘a reminder that [Allen] saw some justification in frontier justice.’ Official hangings carried out under the auspices of the law presumably used real gallows, not trees.”

The same goes for the Confederate flag. I don’t claim that displaying it in his home makes Allen a racist, but it’s still troubling in the context of his history on racial issues.

Finally, the Confederacy was obviously not only about slavery, but it is inextricably linked to it. And yet here is how Allen memorialized the Confederacy, according to the Washington Post: “[I]n the late 1990s, former governor George Allen (R) issued a Confederate History Month proclamation, calling the Civil War ‘a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights’… The declaration made no mention of slavery, angering many civil rights groups.” So let me ask this: Is it appropriate to remember the Confederacy as a struggle for “independence and sovereign rights” without even mentioning the great evil it sought to perpetrate?

People have such a hard time with criticism of politicians who exploit racial issues. The typical response, as with Henke, is to equate such criticism with an accusation of racism — a move that attempts to shift the terms of debate from publicly observable actions and statements to private feelings. We can’t run a democracy based on speculation about the inner life of our leaders. All we can do is judge them based on what they do and say. And on that basis, George Allen fails to meet the standards I expect from someone who wants to be the president of the United States.

(Postscript: A great example of this is the presidential candidacy of George H.W. Bush in 1988. He aggressively exploited the obviously race-coded issue of Willie Horton. It was reprehensible. Does that prove that Bush hates black people? No, but it was loathsome nonetheless.)