It’s important to the “advancement” to which the NAACP is dedicated to try to belittle the first black U.S. senator from the south in more than 130 years.

Add “Is Tim Scott a ventriloquist’s dummy?” to the agenda for that big National Conversation on Race that America’s going to be having any day now.

“A ventriloquist can always find a good dummy,” Barber said, as reported by South Carolina’s The State. “[T]he extreme right wing down here [in South Carolina] finds a black guy to be senator and claims he’s the first black senator since Reconstruction and then he goes to Washington, D.C., and articulates the agenda of the tea party.”

Scott explained that he has never met Barber and implied that the NAACP chapter head knows nothing about him.

“I did not meet him when I was failing out of high school. I did not see him on the streets of my neighborhoods where too many of my friends got off track and never recovered. I did not meet him when I was working 85 hour weeks to start my business, nor did I meet him when I was running for Congress against long odds. But who I did meet were people everywhere across this state who were willing to work hard and to help me succeed — and I them,” Scott said.

Follow the link to the DC for the rest of Scott’s statement. (“I will honor the memory of Dr. King by being proactive in holding the door for others and serving my fellow man. And Rev. Barber will remind me and others of what not to do.”) This is a nice complement to the Sharpton post earlier, actually, in illustrating one of the reasons why even Obama allegedly disdains “professional blacks”: Not even the first black president of the United States is immune from having his blackness impugned because he’s not liberal enough. Let me quote this from “Double Down” again:

Obama, according to the authors, has struggled with the left and the black community. “One day in the spring of 2011, as he sat with some staffers preparing for a speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Obama rattled off a list of his policies,” the authors note in the same passage. “Cracking down on predatory lending. Education reform. Student loan reform. Most important, health care reform. All with an outsize impact on African Americans. All achieved at a time when half of the GOP believed he’d been born in Kenya . Obama threw up his hands. ‘After all that,’ he said, ‘am I still not black enough?’”

The first time he ran for office, against former Black Panther Bobby Rush, he got creamed in part because Rush effectively portrayed him to black voters as an egghead from the wealthy Harvard-educated east coast establishment. That was, arguably, more of a class attack than a racial one, but the lines sometimes blurred: A consultant on Rush’s campaign told the Times that Obama was seen as “not from us, not from the ’hood,” while another candidate in the race sneered that Obama was “the white man in blackface.” Even a card-carrying Democrat who attended Jeremiah Wright’s church and who, incidentally, became the first black president of the law review at that egghead-y school in Massachusetts was liable to have his racial authenticity questioned by the members of the left once it became politically convenient. If a liberal like O still has to deal with that periodically, there’s no point in demanding that his critics respect a principled conservative like Scott. It’s hopeless, thoroughly.