August 13, 2004

527 bigotry
Posted by Jon Henke

A Republican 527 plays the race card, and it's pretty ugly....

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."
That's a pretty strange case for the Republicans to make, as Jesse points out....
Ouch. A truly devastating attack. 'Cept that every single vote against the measure was launched by a Republican. ("What about Zell Miller?" a conservative challenger might ask. Well, I said every single one was a Republican, didn't I?) Beyond the amateurish race-baiting of accusing Kerry of wanting black folks poor and looking for work, why is a Republican group blaming John Kerry for a bill that their own party sunk?
Ezra also points out that the vote may have been intentionally skewed by the GOP to ensure that Kerry's missing vote seemed more important than it was. Not that either party is a stranger to parliamentary tricks, but it seems pretty objectionable to put those in a commercial....especially one that makes your own party look worse (to the target voter group) than it makes the candidate you criticize.

Worse, though, is this bit of race-baiting....

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."
Nonsense. Teresa Heinz Kerry is not black, but she's certainly African-American. Servants don't exclude one from being African-American unless one believes that "a real African-American" wouldn't have (or can't afford) servants.

Which is a pretty racist assumption.

The commercial is a blatant attempt to play up racial prejudices, and the group should be ashamed for producing it.

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Comments

For the first ad, I must be missing your point. Since when is unemployment only a black problem? Sounds to me like you are the racist here.

The second ad was produced by a black group, and is a message from blacks, to blacks. They're saying "she's not one of us". Again, I think the racism here is yours.

Posted by: Bob at August 13, 2004 09:02 AM

The problem is that the ad was specifically--and explicitly--targeted to a black audience, and pretty clearly speaking to that audience, rather than to a general audience of "unemployed people".

Re: your second point, "she's not one of us" is an explicitly racist (or, perhaps, racialist) statement. Imagine a group targetting whites with an ad against a European-born black, saying "he's not one of us".

Posted by: Jon Henke at August 13, 2004 09:41 AM

...or imagine a white man saying he wants to be the second black President. Or a group of blacks running an ad linking a state governer to a horrendous crime just because he refused to expand the useless 'hate crime' body of laws.

...or even imagine coming up with a term like "African-American" that is used in an exclusionary manner to include immigrants from Jamaica but exclude immigrants from Algeria and Egypt.

This doesn't excuse the race-baiting you cite, and I largely agree with you about that. But Ms Heinz-Kerry deliberately misused the accepted meaning of the term "African-American" in such a manner to gather political support by implying a connection to a population where there is no such common experience. It's our society/nation stopped giving a free pass to Democrats on racism and start holding them accountable for their race-baiting tactics and techniques, as well.

But I'd like to reiterate: it doesn't excuse the Republican race-baiting here, and I don't condone taking the low road just because your opponent is.

Posted by: Nathan at August 13, 2004 10:12 AM

Jon, for once I disagree with you for reasons that I listed in my post. But good post all the same.

Posted by: Elliot Fladen at August 13, 2004 10:42 AM

Elliot...I know "getting down and dirty" is par for the course--the way it's done, and the only way--but I don't have to like it.

Now, I agree that it's fair to point out that the Democrats don't deserve their vote, but some of the assumptions and statements were pretty stereotypical, or outright racist. I thought it crossed the line from fair attacks to unfair prejudicial language.

Posted by: Jon Henke at August 13, 2004 06:21 PM