NOTE TO READERS: This ran later yesterday. Due to an error, when we redated this site for today’s edition we mistakenly redated this to Oct. 22. An alert reader notified us of this error so this post is now back in its proper order.
Is the Republican ad below the one that will defeat Democratic Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. in his tight campaign to become Senator of Tennessee?
And what’s the subtext here? You don’t have to be p.c. or a liberal to conclude (as many already have as you’ll SEE BELOW): it’s saying to voters “he likes white women.”
The officially-sanctioned RNC ad has kicked up a firestorm of controversy. MSNBC reports:
With their majority in the Senate potentially hanging in the balance, Republicans were bickering among themselves over an advertisement in the particularly nasty campaign in Tennessee that even some Republicans have denounced as racist.
The dispute pitted former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, the GOP candidate for the seat held by Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, against his own party leadership Tuesday after it rebuffed his call to pull the ad, which lampoons Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s reputation as a man about town.
The problem: if a candidate truly raised a stink and demanded it, he could totally repudiate the ad and demand it be pulled. MORE:
In the ad, a young white actress playing the stereotype of a “dumb blonde� talks about meeting Ford, a 36-year-old bachelor who is black, “at the Playboy party.� At the end of the ad, she winks and says to the camera, “Harold — call me.�
The ad brought immediate criticism from the Ford campaign and the NAACP, whose Washington office called it “a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.�
Ford told MSNBC-TV: “I know that they are a little desperate and doing the things that you do when you get desperate in a campaign.�
Corker himself called the ad “distasteful� Tuesday, telling MSNBC-TV, “I think it ought to come down.� Meanwhile, Bill Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine, criticized it in an interview on CNN as “a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.�
Another problem for the GOP: by appealing to the worst in voters, the GOP could shove this race through and claw its way to a Corker victory but this ad is stirring up a virtual hornet’s nest of anger throughout the country among non-GOPers. And it promises to set back perhaps by decades the Republican party’s efforts to woo black voters.
A charitable explanation is that the GOP is returning to its old “Southern strategy.” A less charitable explanation is that the race is excruciatingly tight and it can’t defeat Ford on policy so it’s playing the race card with a thinly-disguised wink and a nod.
A sign that the GOP intends to keep on keeping on in hammering home this message in what seems to be a new low for politics — even in 2006 — was made evident by the comments of GOP bigwigs:
But MSNBC’s chief Washington correspondent, Norah O’Donnell, reported that Republican strategists told her that they had no intention of pulling the ad and were looking forward to its running right up to Election Day in two weeks.
This intent was signaled today when Republican chairman Ken Mehlman claimed he just didn’t “have the authority” to pull down this ad — an ad that clearly says it was from the Republican National Committee.
More of Cohen’s comments on CNN:
COHEN: I think the Republicans have to be careful, also, in terms of not engaging in conduct. And I was watching the — the Tennessee race, specifically. It reminded me of what happened in North Carolina with Harvey Gantt, a purely-overt racist approach.
BLITZER: You are talking about the new RNC ad which has this white woman talking about Playboy and the — the African-American candidate, Harold Ford Jr., the Democratic candidate.
COHEN: It’s — to me, at least as I watch that, is a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment. And when the question is always asked, why — he would be the first African-American since Reconstruction elected to the Senate, you say, well, why is that the case? So, why is the South different? Why would they not elect someone…
BLITZER: So, you’re a former Republican senator. Is the RNC playing the racial card against Harold Ford in Tennessee right now?
COHEN: I think they are coming very close to it, if not doing it exactly. And I think they ought to stop it. I think that they have a candidate, and discuss the — the issues on the merits, and not get into that kind of personal type of an attack.
Reaction from the NAACP was swift, the LA Times reports:
“It is a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African American men and white women,” said Hilary Shelton, head of the Washington office of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the country’s oldest civil rights organization.
….Shelton said the ad contradicted the spirit of remarks delivered at last year’s NAACP convention by the Republican National Committee chairman, Ken Mehlman, in which he decried those in his party who had tried to “benefit politically from racial polarization.” He was referring to the party’s so-called Southern strategy of energizing white voters with race-baiting messages about integration and civil rights.
“I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong,” Mehlman said in the July 2005 address, in which he also said the party would now use positive messages to draw African Americans to the GOP.
The Times also noted this GOP spin on the controversy — that it was an unseemly illogical controversy:
“I won’t even entertain the premise” that the ad is racially offensive, said Danny Diaz, a Republican Party spokesman. He said the allegation was “not fair and not serious and not accurate.”
Diaz said the ad was an “independent expenditure” produced by an arm of the Republican National Committee that is legally prohibited from coordinating with Mehlman. Because of this, Diaz said, Mehlman did not see or approve the ad before its release.
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said Monday that she was shocked by the ad. Brazile, an African American who has forged a friendship with Mehlman and White House strategist Karl Rove, said she intended to call Mehlman to request that the Republican National Committee discontinue the ad.
“With this ad, Mehlman’s apology rings hollow,” she said, referring to the 2005 speech.
John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist who published a book this year on attack ads, “In Defense of Negativity,” said he had watched the anti-Ford spot repeatedly in recent days.“I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. “I don’t see how you can think it’s not playing a racial card. It’s making references to interracial sex. It’s an ad that is in some sense breaking new lows.”
David Corn, writing in The Guardian:
Add to the list of fears being deployed by Republicans this one: racially-charged fear.
With the congressional elections two weeks away – and all the publicly available polling data still pointing in the wrong direction for President Bush’s party – the Republicans have unleashed the fear furies. The only puzzle is why they waited so long. Late last week, the Republicans released an ad that showed video of Osama bin Laden as the sound of a ticking time bomb turned into the sound of a beating heart. “These are the stakes,” the ad said, suggesting that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for self-annihilation. Then the party started airing an ad that claimed the Democrats would raise taxes – including taxes on working-class Americans – by $2.4 trillion. There is no Democratic proposal to do such a thing.
Later on his piece he notes the Ford ad:
And in Tennessee, where Representative Harold Ford Jr, an African-American Democrat, is threatening to take a Senate seat from the Republicans, the Republican National Committee aired a commercial that accused Ford of accepting campaign contributions from pornographers and that showed a scantily-clad blonde who claimed to have met Ford at a Playboy party winking and saying, “Harold, call me.” The woman was white and the ad suggested that Ford had a thing going with her. Produced for use in a southern and conservative state, the ad could be seen as an attempt to exploit the old racist fear among whites that black men lust after their women.
Even Ford’s opponent denounced the spot and asked the Republican party to stop using it. By the way, another Republican ad accused a Democratic candidate for an open House seat in upstate New York of calling a phone sex line from a hotel and charging it to taxpayers. But the candidate, a local district attorney, had a reasonable explanation: an aide merely had misdialled the toll-free number of a state criminal justice services office-a number that indeed was similar to the sex line number – and the phone bill shows that the aide had been on the sex line for less than a minute.
Once again, the local Republican candidate denounced the commercial. Yet the Republican congressional campaign committee stood by the ad, calling it “totally true”.
So there’s a trend. The GOP runs it, the local candidate denounces it (and is seemingly protected from backlash) and the larger Republican political body stands by or keeps running an ad — ensuring its ostensibly repudiated theme and sleaziness is solidified in the public’s mind. MORE from CORN:
Fear and sleaze. Will any of this work for the getting-desperate-by-the-day Republicans? And is more on the way? Indeed, the stakes are high. That’s why Democrats ought to brace themselves for a blitz of below-the-belt ads in the dwindling days of this campaign.
Questions:
–Will it bring home the GOP base?
–Is the GOP base truly as “base” as the GOP party elites think?
–Will news of the ad motivate more Democrats to go to the polls?
–Will news of the ad further turn off independent voters and will a large number of them cast across-the-boards “protest votes” to vote against the GOP this year due to credibility issues, mismanagement issues and, now, the party of Lincoln raising the black-man-likes-white-woman race card issue?
–Will the ad fuel the backlash against the existing Republican party leadership at the White House and at the party’s high levels among already-upset Republicans who were followers of Barry Goldwater and the first President Bush?
And, if the GOP’s existing team wins using these tactics, what does it portend for the content, style and tone of American politics (and policy-making) heading into the 21st-century?
The bottom line: are there consequences for “going over the line”? Or IS there a “line” anymore?
Or is anything now fair-game in politics — even playing the race card?
UPDATES
Also read: Talking Points Memo, Don Surber, Tennessee Guerilla Women, Newsbusters and also HERE, Americablog,
UPDATE II: Ford has come up with a new counter-ad. And despite the Republican ad he isn’t whipping up the race card. Is an ad like this sufficient to counter the Republican ad that appeals to racial resentment will run to election day (see our post — there is no plan to pull it)? For remains behind in a new poll 45 percent Corker to 43 percent Ford. Ford had been slightly ahead in the previous poll from Mason-Dixon Polling Inc. Ford trails even more in a new L.A. Times poll.
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.