Virginia Senator George Allen is in the political hotseat again, heading into a week when he’s going to have to be answering more questions about his attitudes towards those who aren’t exactly like him. Salon reports:
Three former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.
“Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where ‘blacks knew their place,'” said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. “He used the N-word on a regular basis back then.”
And when you keep reading it’s clear that Allen’s campaign is again going to be rocked by allegations that he is, in effect, indicative of what many people considered to be the “old South” versus the modern South. Perhaps its this, more than anything else, that will lead to his exit from Congress if he loses. Allen now carries so much political baggage that TSA is going to have to open a special George Allen Department to inspect it. READ ON:
A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the word “nigger” to describe blacks. “It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used,” the teammate said.
Not good. AND:
A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the word “nigger,” though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. “My impression of him was that he was a racist,” the third teammate said.
That assertion by itself wouldn’t be enough to be damaging…if it hadn’t come within the context of (a) the previous statements, (b) the “macaca” incident and Allen and his staff’s varying explanations of why he put his foot in his mouth and (c) the recent flap over him being asked about being partly Jewish and the clumsy answer he gave that created another mouth-induced political wound. THEN:
Shelton also told Salon that the future senator gave him the nickname “Wizard,” because he shared a last name with Robert Shelton, who served in the 1960s as the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. The radiologist said he decided earlier this year that he would go public with his concerns about Allen if a reporter ever called. About four months ago, when he heard that Allen was a possible candidate for president in 2008, Shelton began to write down some of the negative memories of his former teammate. He provided Salon excerpts of those notes last week.
The question is whether the Salon piece will graduate to the political mainstream. Most likely he’ll be asked about it this week. He can note that it happened in the days when he was young and stupid, but that might not work due to his recent comments which suggest Allen has retained part of his youthful characteristics.
The irony is that James Webb is not the ideal candidate either (his campaign early on was accused of releasing an anti-Semitic cartoon) but next to Allen he seems baggage-free.
PS: The possibility of Allen running for President increasingly seems as likely as George Bush giving a neck message to Hugo Chavez.
Via Raw Story
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.