A Washington Post item yesterday about a new “group” attacking John Kerry on black radio stations was offensive on several levels.
One of the radio ads addresses Kerry’s failure to vote on a bill to extend unemployment benefits for 13 weeks: “It needed 60 votes to pass. Ninety-nine out of 100 senators voted — Kerry did not! It lost by one vote! Maybe Kerry thought the more of us who are unemployed and hurting, the more likely we would vote Democrat.”
Another ad attacks Teresa Heinz Kerry, who, at the Democratic convention last month cited her birth and upbringing in Mozambique and who has described herself as African American. In the radio commercial, the announcer says: “His wife says she’s an African American. While technically true, I don’t believe a white woman, raised in Africa, surrounded by servants, qualifies.”
I realize the motivation. Kerry enjoys overwhelming support in the African-American community and is poised to repeat Al Gore’s success with the “black vote,” of which Bush captured all of 9% in the last election. If Bush’s unscrupulous allies can undermine Kerry’s support with lies, it may help BC04 in a few key states.
But motivations aside, this attack is so outrageous, it’s hard to know where to start.
First, the attack over the vote on unemployment benefits, like the Senate vote itself, is a scam that hopes to take advantage of the public not knowing the truth.
No matter what, that proposal was going to fail; the Republican majority had arranged for every contingency. If Kerry was on the floor, GOP senators were prepared to vote against it and kill the bill. But with Kerry on the campaign trail, they carefully choreographed the vote to make sure the final tally was 59-40 so Kerry would appear to be responsible. In other words, the GOP simply turned Senate business into a campaign stunt on Bush’s behalf.
But the more offensive component to the radio ads isn’t the deceptive content; it’s the messenger.
The ads are coming from a group that calls itself “People of Color United.” The man behind the ad that accuses Teresa Heinz Kerry of not being African American enough is — you guessed it — white. And while this group may be “united,” they are certainly not made up of “people of color.”
The D.C.-based group, People of Color United, has substantial financial backing from J. Patrick Rooney, the former chairman of Golden Rule Insurance Co. and the founder of a new firm, Medical Savings Insurance Co. Both firms specialize in medical savings accounts, created by Republican-backed 1996 legislation, and health savings accounts, which were created by President Bush’s 2003 Medicare prescription drug legislation.
So the man who is paying for ads that will target African-American voters on African-American media is a white millionaire who got even richer thanks to Bush’s and the GOP’s help.
Indeed, by all incidcations, “People of Color United,” which claims to be located in DC, seems to hardly exist as an actual entity. It has no website and no number in the DC phone book. A quick call to information in the area produced no listing for a group of that name. As Slate’s Tim Noah noted:
All its funding information will eventually be public, but the law does not require People of Color United to file with the IRS before the ads go on the air. It will be interesting to learn whether a single person of color has written a check to People of Color United.
I’d be just as interested to know if it has any donors not named “Rooney.”
This has all the makings of yet another front group, created by wealthy white guys who create a group that claims to be of, by, and for the African-American community. The conservatives’ efforts in this area, which have been going on too long, are only as cynical as they are racist.
For example, Joshua Holland recently noted in a terrific item for The Gadflyer that Project 21, which bills itself as an organization of conservative African-Americans, is led by a man named David Almasi — who is white. What’s worse, he is Project 21’s only staff member.
If Project 21 and People of Color United were the only ones, it’d still be scandalous. Unfortunately, these “groups” are just the tip of the iceberg.
The Black Alliance for Educational Options was created by wealthy white conservatives to serve as front group for public funding of private schools. The African American Republican Leadership Council has a 15-person advisory board — 13 of whom are white. Congressional Republicans created the American Dream PAC in 1999 in order to “give significant, direct financial assistance to first-rate minority GOP candidates.” Yet the PAC has no African-American staffers and gives almost no money to minority office-seekers.
The Republicans’ alleged interest in minority communities is hollow when it’s not entirely fictional.
We now have white millionaires, who happen to oppose the very issues of concern to African-American communities nationwide, paying for deceptive attack ads that try and con black voters. It’s a disgrace.
When Bush gets around to denouncing the Swiftboat Hacks, he should denounce this nonsense too.