‘A very serious appeal to a racist sentiment’

October 25, 2006

Way back in March, Republicans started worrying about Rep. Harold Ford’s (D) Senate campaign in Tennessee. GOP officials unveiled what they called the “Fancy Ford” campaign, complete with a website, created by the NRSC, which included pictures of Ford and expensive restaurants, hotels, cigars, meals, and Playboy bunnies. Ford is African American — and the Playboy bunnies are all white, adding a disturbing racial element to the campaign. Indeed, as Jesse Berney and Jason Zengerle noted, the NRSC was basically portraying Ford as a black pimp.

At the time, I wrote, “It’s March and already the NSRC is dabbling in racism. If these guys are this desperate now, I shudder to think about what they’ll stoop to in October.” Now we know.

A political TV ad targeting a black candidate for Senate contains what critics, including the NAACP, are calling racist sexual innuendo about a black man and white woman.

The Republican National Committee ad began airing Friday and features a series of characters facetiously declaring their support for Democrat Harold Ford Jr., a Memphis congressman who faces Republican Bob Corker, who is white, in the Nov. 7 election. Polls have shown the two locked in a tight race.

In the ad, a blond white woman brags, “I met Harold at the Playboy party.” At the end she looks into the camera, holds her hand like a telephone and says, “Harold, call me,” before winking.

Hilary Shelton, head of the Washington NAACP office, said, “It is a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.”

Former Republican Sen. William Cohen characterized the ad as “a purely overt racist approach” and is “a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.” Asked if the RNC, which sponsored the attack ad against Ford, has played the racial card, Cohen said, “I think they are coming very close to it, if not doing it exactly. And I think they ought to stop it.”

Even Ford’s Republican opponent, former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, has asked Tennessee television stations not to run the spot, calling it “over the top.”

And what does RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman have to say about all this? It’s a funny story….

Mehlman argues that he, despite being the head of the RNC, can’t do anything about an RNC advertisement.

RUSSERT: Ken Mehlman, the Republican candidate in Tennessee has asked that you take that ad off the air, that it is over the top. Former Republican Senator William Cohen says it’s, quote, “overt racist appeal.” Will you take that ad down?

MEHLMAN: Tim, I don’t have the authority to take it down or put it up. It’s what called an independent expenditure. The way that process works under the campaign reform laws is I write a check to an independent individual. And that person’s responsible for spending money in certain states. Tennessee is one of them.

I’ll tell you this, though. After the comments by Mr. Corker and by former Senator Cohen, I looked at the ad. I don’t agree with that characterization of it. But it’s not an ad that I have authority over.

There are three parts to this. One, can the RNC chairman pull one of the RNC’s ads? Mehlman says he can’t, though he appears to be playing fast and loose with the truth. What a surprise.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010547.php

Two, is the ad itself racist? You can watch it for yourself, but like Josh Marshall, I don’t think there’s any real question here.

The ad has a number of faux man on the street interviews. Each is a spoof based on GOP policy talking points. So for instance, a hunter is interviewed and he says “Ford’s right. I do have too many guns.” An older guy says “When I die, Harold Ford will let me pay taxes again.” Not my cup of tea as far as humor goes….But pretty standard fair for ‘funny’ political ads. And each addressed to a question of public policy.

But then you see that one ‘man on the street interview’ isn’t quite like the rest. It’s almost like those old Sesame Street segments, one of these things is not like the other. It’s the one spot with the platinum blonde with no visible clothes on, vamping “I met Harold at the Playboy Party.”

What policy issue is she talking about? It’s not connected to anything. It’s just, ‘I’m a loose white woman. I hooked up with Harold at the Playboy mansion. And I can’t wait for him to do me again.’

Once you watch the ad again after realizing that, it sticks out like a sore thumb. What becomes clear is that the funny man on the street interview clips are padding, filler meant to make the ‘Harold does white chicks’ blurb appear to fit into a larger whole, just one of a number of ‘man on the street’ clips.

Mehlman says he doesn’t think race is an issue in the ad. But face it, the entire ad was built around this one hot button racist appeal. It’s not even close.

And three, Ken Mehlman appeared before the NAACP in 2005, apologizing for the way in which his party has exploited racism for political gain. No serious person considers that apology sincere now.

The “Southern Strategy,” in other words, lives. I guess old habits die hard, don’t they, Ken?

Gotta love that Republican honesty, integrity and morality.

  • It may not be pretty, but George Allen is inside the margin of error in the Virginia senate race, so it’s obvious that, in 2006, this stuff still appeals to or at least isn’t a dealbreaker for a lot of Americans. Those of us who live in or near the redder regions of our nation aren’t even surprised.

    Sometimes I throw up my hands and think, “This country has the leaders it deserves.”

  • I think the Dems have to be a little careful screaming about this ad. First, I’ll be the odd leftist out here and say that I do not think it is clearly racist. Second, if it is, and that is an intentional strategy, the uproar merely gives it legs and free airing.

    Personally, my view is that Ford is a single man, he can date whomever and however he pleases so long as they are adult, consenting, and human (because we progressives, well, unlike some people, we don’t do goats).

    But here are the facts we need to think about before we jump into this fray: Tennessee has a lot of evangelical moralizing voters. Ford did a key ad filmed inside a church. Ford dated a younger women who wrote a column on sexuality for her college newspaper (and if I recall correctly, she was white). Ford admits he attended a Playboy party, unapologetically.

    So to use a white “playmate” making strongly sexual suggestions about Ford could just be an appeal to uptight moralists about the fact he went to a Playboy party and once dated a sex columnist. Particularly if it is simply a fact that she was white (and frankly I’m betting some, perhaps most, of the women at the Playboy party were white as well).

    You can argue it is irrelevant. You can argue it is nobody’s business (my personal view). You certainly SHOULD argue there is nothing wrong with interracial dating. You can argue it will, not coincidentally, motivate certain racist voters, which it probably will. But given that the rest of the ad is based on over-the-top caricatures of positions Ford has actually taken, can you really say the stripper-chick part of it is any different? What part of it isn’t based in fact? And given the ad-in-the-church, can we really say “morality” is not fair game?

    I think the left walks right into a trap if we push back too hard on this ad. It gives the right a chance to reiterate the underlying facts, which given Ford’s nonchalant admission about the Playboy party (at least per PoliticalWire) may be just as damaging as the ad itself.

    I say make a little fun of it as silly, over-the-top nonsense and then try to give it as short of shelf life as possible. But we only do the R’s a favor if we make this a racial issue.

  • Time for the Dems to start playing hardball.

    This type of ad WORKS. It requires no thought, and just a bare knowledge of current events. Dems should launch an ad with similar interviews, and have one of them be a child molester, and have him say “I like the Republicans, they believe that people like me are fine as long as we help the party win.”

    Have another guy in a suit say: “I like the Republicans, they gave me a million dollar tax cut AND some fat contracts to sell the army defective body armor”

    Have a “Republican” senator say to the camera “Geez these Christians are suckers. They think we’re actually going to push their stupid issues? They keep falling for it, EVERY TIME. Haw Haw.”

    Come ON, Dems. This isn’t little league. You want to lose AGAIN? Then play by the rules as they stand. Go for the jugular.

  • Even Ford’s Republican opponent, former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, has asked Tennessee television stations not to run the spot, calling it “over the top.”

    Yeah, I’ll bet he’s just beside himself. Let me guess he’s been losing sleep, can’t eat, tearing his hair out hoping someone … anyone … at the RNC will listen and pull the ad. And since they won’t, Corker’s appealed to Tennessee stations not to allow the race to sink even further in the gutter by running this “over the top” ad. Right.

  • First, I’ll be the odd leftist out here and say that I do not think it is clearly racist.

    Anyone who’s ever spent some time in a southern state or around dyed-in-the-wool southerners knows exactly what the RNC is hinting at. Not so long ago, statements like this would have been grounds for lynching Harold Ford Jr.

  • Damn right Racerx. We must , to a certain extent, deal with world as it is. Play the class warfare card and the generational warfare card and the honesty card and competence card…the thugs have given us a full deck. We dont have to bluff, but we DO have to play the cards.

  • Brainiac, I agree that is what they are hinting at. But I also think the defense they have available is too easy: we used a white women in the ad because that is based in fact, but our point is this alleged Good Christian is hanging out with Playmates. Good God-Fearing Tennesseeans, is that your idea of a wholesome Christian? (Being a hedonistic Deist, that wouldn’t work so well with me, but I feel safe saying it would sell a lot of the fine folks in rural Tenn.) The better angle of attack is that Corker wants it pulled and Mehlman is a lying sleaze-bag. Going with the race angle is both easy to rebut AND lets them bash his “hanging out with porn stars” AND fires up the very base the race angle is aimed at.

  • Any hillbilly in Tennessee would tell you that nigger-dating is better that teaching your daughter homo-ism.

    So let’s run this ad in TN:

    “Ford. Democrat. A quintessential all-American who watches football and likes grown-up girls.

    Corker. Republican. A confused man who raised a girl who kisses other girls on a website called ‘facebook’.

    Vote Democrat this November”

  • I agree with Racerx #4. Another tactic to give the Repubs some of their own medicine is to have a 16 year old boy say “I want to be a Congressional page in Washington. If Bob Corker wants to get into my page dorm or take me on a camping trip, he should give me a call.”

  • A counter “man on the street” ad, talking about Corker is in order. I suggest staging funny over the top meeting of sleeze bucket Corker political advisers planning their dirty ads.
    Swiftboat 101.. send back the garbage with precise return fire.

  • They run ads like this in southern states because they work, at least in the short term. They don’t care that it’s over the top because, for them (even the Christianists), it serves the higher purpose of conservative Republican rule.

    If this comes back to haunt them, hopefully it’ll be in the ’08 presidential race when bs like this ad thwarts their goal of minimizing the Dems’ advantage in the national black vote.

    As for Ford, he IS pretty conservative himself. His family IS corrupt, he DID vote for the torture bill. His stunt at Corker’s press conference WAS stupid and Tennessee IS a right wing state. Our efforts now would be better focused on MO, VA, AZ, NV and CT. Ford sucks anyway. He’d only enrage embarrass us in the Senate the way Lieberman does.

    Let’s take a long term view. We can take the house this time and narrow the gap in the Senate. The Republicans will have to defend 21 and 19 Senate seats in 2008 and 2010, respectively. Let’s focus on electing moderate and progressive Democrats and building a solid, strong center-left governing coalition.

  • “MEHLMAN: Tim, I don’t have the authority to take it down or put it up. It’s what called an independent expenditure. The way that process works under the campaign reform laws is I write a check to an independent individual. And that person’s responsible for spending money in certain states.”

    So, who is this person in Tennessee????? Don’t you know? What a lying maroon.

    “independent expenditure” What a term. Was the outing of Valerie Plame an “independent expenditure”?? Was the Fallujah fiasco just another “independent expenditure”, wasn’t Iran-Contra another “independent expenditure”??

    I wonder, when Blackwater Security comes kicking my door down and hauling my socialist ass off to who-knows-where, will anyone know who cut the check for that little “independent expenditure”.
    The GOP just raises money and gives it to any fascist kook who comes along. This is much better than the tax-and-spend Democrats??

  • Sometimes I throw up my hands and think, “This country has the leaders it deserves.”
    Comment by pk — 10/25/2006 @ 11:26 am
    ————–

    …and sometimes, I just throw up…
    I’m tempted to say that our political system has sunk as low as it possibly can, but I hate to tempt fate like that…

  • I just hope the voters in Tennessee have grown up enough not to fall for this crap.

    But just a comment to those who have suggested elsewhere that the blond in the ad is ugly (or at least not Playboy Manson material). I think she’s okay looking. Kind of Mary-Louise Parker like.

    Not that Mary-Louise Parker actually has every appealed to me, but still, we’re not talking a dog here.

  • I think one other difference with the girl’s bit in the ad is that she makes a statement of “fact”. The other people are stating opinions, but she says, “I partied with Harold Ford at the Playboy Mansion.” Did she? If she didn’t then the ad has a lie in it in addition to the attempt to play the race card.

  • While I’m not particularly fond of Ford, and like others I think it would be a good idea for him and other candidates to fight fire with fire, pointing to other, arguably more important issues. Perhaps a Democratic ad could contain images like: 1) a fast food worker saying, “XXX believes I don’t deserve a raise.”; 2) an elderly couple saying, “XXX wants us to pay $4,000 before Medicare covers our medication.”; 3) a Paris-Hilton like party-goer saying, “XXX wants to make sure that I don’t have to pay any tax on the money I inherit!”; 4) a soldier saying, “XXX doesn’t want me to have extra protection while serving our country in a war zone. I’m sure others can pick the issues much better and come up with much better presentations of them, as I can off the top of my head, but you get the kind of ad I’d like to see.

  • At this point I’d be strongly tempted, were I the Democrats, to try and force Mehlman out of the closet. Let’s see how the Republican Zombie Army of Good Christians feels about being conducted by a gay guy (who also happens to be Jewish).

    It’s ugly and my stomach is actually turning as I write this, but I’m increasingly convinced the bastards won’t stop until we show them that we can do awful things too.

  • Snow Camp: go fight a “principled” left wing campaign that LOSES in some other election. You sound like one of those moron German Stalinists in 1932 who said cooperating with the Social Fascists (their term for the Social Democrats) was much worse than allying with them to oppose the Nazis in the elections of January 1933.

    I believe history will inform you of the success of that lefty-moron idea.

    I’m actually much further left than you, and I would have no difficulty voting for Harold Ford on the grounds he is Not A Republican. Right now that’s all the qualification we need. We can worry how many progressives can dance on the head of a pin after we get rid of the threat of fascism and the overthrow of the Republic.

  • Or Harold Ford could amp up the political conversation and borrow a page (oops, I guess only the Repubs do that!) from Lyndon Johnson’s decades-old playbook and spread the rumor that his opponent is a pigf*cker…

    (When an aide confronted Johnson with evidence to the contrary, Johnson reportedly said, “I know he isn’t…I just want to hear him deny it…”)

  • “I know he isn’t…I just want to hear him deny it…”-ricardo

    But it’s hard to come up with a rumor about repubs that isn’t true.

  • How sordid all this is. I’m from Louisiana, and I’ve seen this attitude close up. Being as base as the other side is not the answer, though. The answer is to shame the rest of the GOP by calling the tactic bigotted, calling the candidate who benefits from it bigotted (yeah, I know, he’s shocked, shocked over the whole thing), and calling the party bigotted.

    And don’t say racist, that almost sounds like a considered position. Say bigot– it reflects the knee-jerk hatred being displayed.

    Bigot. Bigot. Bigot. Say it with me. The GOP is the party of bigots. You’re a Republican? Are you a bigot like that Corker fellow?

    Anybody who doesn’t like being tarred with that brush has a choice: leave the party or work to purge it of bigots.

  • Even Ford’s Republican opponent, former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, has asked Tennessee television stations not to run the spot, calling it “over the top.” — CB

    That seems to be the emerging pattern these last few days. NRC puts out an odious/lying ad smearing the Dem. The Republican candidate decries the ad and says he doesn’t want it to run. NRC refuses to take it down. So the ad continues to run doing it’s “mole job” and the Repub in question is supposed to be whitewashed of all guilt.

    But, since this is the third (4th?) time it has happened within a week, in different areas of the country, I no longer believe the Repub candidate to be the principled knight in the shining armor. Sorry. Once, it’s credible. Twice, maybe. Three times in a row?

    Besides… Corker now has an ad of his own (… and I approve this message) — a radio one. Where the “Corker music” is soaring and inspirational, while “Ford music” is jungle-drums.
    Not racist? Pshaw!

    • Comments are closed.