LADIES and gentlemen,

direct your attention to the center ring, and witness one of the world's most death-defying acts of aerial artistry.

Or you can leave the big top and head out to the midway, where Shake-Dance Lil and the Bearded Lady will titillate you.

Those are our choices, people. And for now, it seems,

we're being herded to the midway.

At least that's what the race-haters and race-baiters hope we will choose. They want to lure us out of the main tent, where the most important domestic-policy issue in America is being debated, and out onto the midway, where an utterly pointless debate about racism will keep us running in place, no closer to resolving either health care or racism.

That's why I don't welcome former President Carter's entry into the debate. In his view, racism is a subtext of some of the clearly hateful attacks on the president that we've seen during health-care debates, town-hall meetings and tea parties.

I agree. When the first black president is called everything from Nazi to socialist, when his wife is vilified as a ghetto girl, and he is portrayed as a witch doctor, when Glenn Beck without a shred of evidence can convince people that President Obama has "a deep-seated hatred of white people," when political leaders warn parents to shield their children from hearing a president urge them to get an education and when a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ can tell parishioners that he is praying for the president to die, any fair-minded person has to wonder if racism is not a subtext of at least some of those protests.

But I don't care.

What difference does it make to me whether South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson's disrespect is motivated by latent racism or if he's just a lowlife who can't control his impulses?

If some idiot runs around with a sign that says "liar, liar, pants on fire," it doesn't matter to me whether he is a racist or just demonstrating the effects of arrested development.

Why should I have to diagnose the delusions that prompt some people to believe that the president is not even a U.S. citizen. Their pathology is their problem.

It's not my problem. It's not our problem as Americans. When the health-care crisis is closing small businesses, when 14,000 people a day are losing health insurance and health costs are escalating at twice the inflation rate, we just don't have time to figure out if some guy is a racist or just a fool.

Ask yourself, who benefits from this distraction? It certainly is not the president, which is why he has stayed above the fray.

Why is this debate being raised by Jimmy Carter and syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd as opposed to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? They may get dragged into it at some point, but they have kept themselves out of it for the most part.

Here's another question: Why is it that political leaders from the right have failed to speak out against some of these fringe elements who use conservative platforms to display their ignorance?

Instead, some of the same leaders who had nothing to say about that will waste time trying to defend the motives of these fringe players rather than challenge their hateful expressions of rage.

Every day that we get stuck on this sidetrack it becomes less likely that we will resolve this health-care crisis.

That's why the president did not respond when he was compared with Adolf Hitler or when "patriots" armed to the teeth showed up at his rallies.

The president, according to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, "does not believe that that criticism comes based on the color of his skin."

Is the president too naive to detect even the slightest element of racism in the tenor of some of these protests?

Of course not.

But, like all tightrope walkers, he knows that has to keep his eye on the objective.

So do we.

Or else we can head out to

freak-show row and watch Shake-Dance Lil and the Bearded Lady.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith