I am so accustomed to cascades of evasion, distortion, misinformation, and out-and-out lies from Republicans that I’d come to assume that deceit was a reactionary métier. But features of the glacial removal from office of St. Louis CA Kim Gardner have shown that the left has its offenders, if on a far smaller scale.

I don’t know that it’s right to describe Ms Gardner as “soft on crime,” but her behavior has been what one might expect from a black politician playing to a majority urban black community that is, let’s face it, a semi-criminal culture. It’s within that community that shootings take place routinely day and night. It’s there that a very large number of people have family members, relatives, and friends who have done time, are doing time, or are likely to do time, and this situation, though surely not welcomed, is obviously tolerated. If you want to pick up a lot of votes in this community, you had better not come down hard on crime, but should displace responsibility to other elements of society and portray the criminals, the criminalized community, and oneself as victims. This is just the way things are now, and we must hope for better.

However, Ms Gardner is not only soft on crime, but soft on herself. Throughout her tenure the prosecutor’s office has been dysfunctional. Her complete screw-up has drawn a lot of criticism, criticism that she attacks as being racist in origin and at bottom all about her. Now, it’s possible that people dislike you because of what you are (race, religion, social class, etc.), and it’s easy to claim that this is the case when, in fact, they dislike you because of who you are. Paranoia loves to bask in the imagined approval of all, but it may also enjoy being the focus of universal antagonism.

Pop-psychologizing is unfair. But even so I have to wonder if the sources of Ms Gardner’s abrasiveness, apparently utter lack of organizational ability, and martyr complex lie not in the circumstances in which she finds herself, but in her psychological makeup. 

The situation is not helped by the hype that has attended Ms Gardner’s time as prosecutor, culminating in Mr. Adolphus Pruitt, head of the local NAACP, hailing Gardner’s downfall as “a modern-day lynching.” Oh, come on, Adolphus! It has not been helped by the prolonged silence of other black politicians who until quite recently have avoided any criticism of Ms Gardner. Is it an unwritten rule among black politicians never to criticize other blacks however deserved the criticism and however much the public needs to hear it?

It will take a long time for the office of the prosecutor to recover from Ms Gardner’s virtual sabotage, and it will take a long time for black St. Louis to recover lost credibility.