Frank Rich, who appropriately enough used to be the NYT’s head theater critic, speaks highly of S.R. Sidharth (via Kos):

… the “macaca” who provoked the senator’s self-destruction, S. R. Sidarth, was not an immigrant but the son of immigrants. He was born in Washington’s Virginia suburbs to well-off parents (his father is a mortgage broker) and is the high-achieving graduate of a magnet high school, a tournament chess player, a former intern for Joe Lieberman, a devoted member of his faith (Hindu) and, currently, a senior at the University of Virginia. He is even a football jock like Mr. Allen…

The Sidarths are typical of the families who have abetted the rapid growth of northern Virginia in recent years, much as immigrants have always built and renewed our nation. They, not Mr. Allen with his nostalgia for the Confederate “heritage,” are America’s future. [Link]

He sees the Republican flameout as a repudiation of the racially divisive Southern strategy:

Mr. Allen was the slickest form of Bush-Rove conservative, complete with a strategist who’d helped orchestrate the Swift Boating of John Kerry… As recently as April 2005… Mr. Allen was chosen in a [survey] as the most likely Republican presidential nominee in 2008…Conservatives faulted Allen for an ‘awful campaign,’ not for being an awful person

Though the senator’s behavior was toxic, the Bush-Rove establishment… echoed the Allen campaign’s complaint that the incident was inflated by the news media… conservative pundits mainly faulted him for running an “awful campaign,” not for being an awful person…

His demise was so sudden and so unlikely that it seems like a fairy tale come true… Mr. Allen’s defeat was poetic justice: the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit, all in the name of “faith…”

[The] national Republican campaign… made a fetish of warning that a Congress run by Democrats would have committee chairmen who are black… or gay… and a middle-aged woman not in the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker. [Link]

And he paraphrases Allen:

Welcome back, everyone, to the world of real America. [Link]

Sidharth wrote his own opinion piece in the WaPo (via Sepia):

I was singled out at a GOP picnic, identified as “macaca or whatever his name is” — despite the fact that Allen knew my name, as we had been traveling the same route for five days…

Allen’s actions that day stood out because they were not representative of how I was treated while traveling around the state… I cannot recall one event where food was served and I was not invited to join in the meal… The following day, at the picnic in Breaks, even after Allen’s comments highlighted my outsider status, I was not allowed to depart without eating, because as one woman put it, “Political differences are set aside at the dinner table.” In the same spirit, I was given accurate directions to Allen’s next event, held in Bluefield the following morning…

The hairstyle inflicted upon me by two friends late one night… was intended to be a mullet and has since grown out to nearly the appropriate length. [Link]