Race and a Firing, Reconsidered

Wow: Now USDA is reconsidering the ouster of Georgia State Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod after taking the time to watch the entire video of her controversial remarks on race.

To recap: Sherrod resigned under pressure Monday after Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site highlighted a speech she made earlier this year at an NAACP banquet. In that address, she acknowledged that back in 1986, she failed to give a white farmer the "full force" of her help in saving his farm, believing that he could get assistance from "his own."

Sherrod's defenders, including the NAACP -- which reversed itself on her ouster during the course of the day yesterday, saying it had been "snookered" by Breitbart -- said the full context of her remarks showed the point she was trying to make was that she had learned that taking such a race-based approach to efforts to aid farmers was wrong.

But that much actually was clear even from the edited excerpt of Sherrod's remarks, which made it apparent that the point of her story was to emphasize she had learned that race was not the dominant factor she had thought it was. That fact was simply overwhelmed by the "gotcha" reaction to her remarks about the white farmer.

This whole episode reinforces two truths about Washington:

• Honesty and forthrightness on key issues, especially involving race, is generally punished.
• In the radically truncated news cycle, the tendency to engage in knee-jerk reactions is incredibly powerful. In this case, USDA is reconsidering its decision largely because it simply didn't give the decision enough consideration in the first place.