In Politics, Just How Far Is Too Far?
By PETER APPLEBOME
THORNWOOD, N.Y.
Pshew. In this year of free-range Islamophobia, birtherism and on-demand rage, when politicians feel they must turn up the dial to 11 to be heard: No Shariah law! Repeal the 17th Amendment! Bring guns to your rallies! — it looks as if someone has finally managed to show how far is too far.
That someone is Jim Russell, the obscure Republican taking on Representative Nita Lowey in the 18th Congressional District that includes much of Westchester County and a slice of Rockland. TheRepublican Party plans to go to court to remove him from the ballot and says it will endorse another candidate after the Web site Politico turned up a 2001 essay in which Mr. Russell seemed to embrace, among other things, racial separatism, eugenics and an assortment of historical and literary figures with anti-Semitic or Nazi ties. It also turns out that he has attended gatherings of groups with white nationalist views.
Mr. Russell's offending words came in an article titled "The Western Contribution to World History," published in The Occidental Quarterly, a journal that's home to many far-right writers and scholars.
Most of it is quite bland. Some of it is not. One section takes in the mating behavior of finches, "the destructiveness of school integration, especially in the middle and high school years," and media moguls promoting miscegenation in films directed toward youths. "In the midst of this onslaught against our youth, parents need to be reminded that they have a natural obligation, as essential as providing food and shelter, to instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage," Mr. Russell wrote.
Yikes. No wonder it was featured for a while on the Web site of the former Louisiana politician and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. (For good measure he also in 1996 had a letter published in the Journal News saying court orders can't alter what nature has preordained: "that it is normal and healthy for people to prefer the company of their own kind in their neighborhoods and schools."
THAT said, in an election year with no brakes, Mr. Russell in person seems pretty tame: he is a soft-spoken 56-year-old father of two daughters with a doctorate in historical theology from Fordham University. Mr. Russell got about a third of the vote when he ran against Ms. Lowey in 2008. Mr. Russell's campaign has mostly been relatively mainstream conservatism focused on immigration, economics and opposition to Westchester's federal Fair Housing settlement. He cites Ron Paul as a big influence, but you can find more rabid political red-meat in other races.
Mr. Russell said Republicans were being "hypersensitive" in dropping their endorsement but that, in retrospect, some of his writings went too far. "It was 10 years ago," he said of the essay. "Some of it's a little bit more strident than I would put it today."
Still, it's not entirely clear what his being the target of ritual stoning says about the fickle nature of political pariahhood.
Maybe Mr. Russell's potential banishment indicates that at least segregation is off the table, but then there's Rand Paul, the Tea Party favorite in Kentucky, who has suggested that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was too broad and should not apply to private businesses, like luncheonettes.
Perhaps Representative Eliot L. Engel, a Democrat, was taking a cheap shot when he asked why Mr. Russell got the boot while the Republican candidate for governor, Carl P. Paladino, got a pass for sending racist and pornographic e-mails, but the e-mails are a lot grosser than Mr. Russell's essay.
What to make of the assertion of the Nevada Republican Senate nominee, Sharron Angle, that the Second Amendment was added so people could protect themselves against a tyrannical government, and "if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies"? And then there's State Representative Tom Emmer, the Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, whose view of the ability of states to nullify federal laws approximates that of Jefferson Davis.
You wonder what would have happened if Mr. Russell were in a competitive race or if he were sitting on a wad of cash to finance his own campaign. After all, there's a candidate running for the Senate in Connecticut whose contribution to Western civilization might have merited a dour footnote in Mr. Russell's essay and whose Republican primary opponents depicted her business's health and safety record in ways that could have described the gladiators in the Roman Coliseum. But then she also has $50 million or so to rub off those rough edges. Or maybe it would take more than $50 million to save Mr. Russell from his own words.
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