The Empire ... Strikes Back.

James Taranto writing in the Wall Street Journal takes issue with Lee Siegel's recent racial analysis piece:

Siegel writes that "Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory." That sounds like a promising start to a Chris Rock comedy riff, but Siegel means it as a serious thesis.

"I'm not talking about a strict count of melanin density," Siegel writes. Rather, he refers to something he imagines is less ludicrous: Romney's "whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America."

This is almost like a Peggy Noonan observation from a few months ago:

Mr. Romney's added value is his persona. He's a little like the father in one of those 1950s or '60s sitcoms that terrorized and comforted a generation of children from non-functioning families: Somewhere there was a functioning one, and it was nice enough to visit you on Wednesday at 8. He's like Robert Young in "Father Knows Best," or Fred MacMurray in "My Three Sons": You'd quake at telling him about the fender-bender, but after the lecture on safety and personal responsibility, he'd buck you up and throw you the keys.

Almost but not quite, for Noonan did not racialize the type. In her telling, it is Romney's confident, responsible masculinity that is reassuring. In Siegel's, it is the color of Romney's skin.
...
Siegel isn't the first to define the "opportunity society" as being for whites only. Last June, as we noted, MSNBC's Chris Matthews accused Romney of having employed a "slur" for observing of Obama that in his approach to economic policy, "he's awfully European." Matthews apparently is unaware that Europe's biggest export to America has been white people.

Slam!
He goes on:

Romney and his fellow Republicans are making a case (at least relative to President Obama) for economic freedom and against the expansion of government. To be sure, one may prefer Obama's policies on reasoned grounds that have nothing to do with race. It is also true that for most of America's history, and as recently as the 1960s, blacks were denied the freedoms, economic and otherwise, that whites took for granted.

But no Republican running for president is proposing a return to Jim Crow or a repeal of civil rights laws. Siegel's implicit notion that only whites are capable of benefiting from economic freedom under a regime of legal equality amounts to an insidious theory of racial supremacy.

That is the idea that Newt Gingrich repudiated in answer to Juan Williams's (not particularly objectionable) question. That is what brought the crowd to their feet.