ANDREW SULLIVAN has it right:

I’m second to few in believing that Trent Lott should step down as SML. But that doesn’t mean I like the racial politics of the current Democratic Party. In fact, the way some far-left Democrats use race is no less repulsive than the way some far-right Republicans do. The equation of opposition to affirmative action or hate-crime laws or any other number of leftist policies with racism strikes me as a massively cheap shot. (I was on WBUR last night and paleo-lib Jack Beatty went straight to that knee-jerk point. Grrrr.) And the blithe assumption of moral superiority is equally galling.

Galling, and unjustified. The Democrats lost the high ground on race when they became the party of quotas and racial spoils systems instead of equal opportunity. That was sometime back before I hit puberty.

UPDATE: Armed Liberal has some thoughts on the “high ground.”