http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?ID=315230&Category=23
Democrats Cry Foul Over GOP Ad in Tennessee
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- A new Republican Party television ad featuring a scantily clad white woman winking and inviting a black candidate to “call me” is drawing charges of race-baiting, with critics saying it contradicts landmark GOP statement last year that the party was wrong in past decades to use racial appeals to win support from white voters.
Critics said the ad, which is funded by the Republican National Committee and has aired since Friday, plays on fears of interracial relationships to scare some white voters in rural Tennessee to oppose Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. Ford is locked in a tight race to become the first black senator since Reconstruction to represent a state in the former Confederacy.
“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 Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the oldest U.S. civil rights organization.
A former Republican senator, Bill Cohen of Maine, was more blunt. Speaking on CNN, Cohen called the GOP ad “a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.”
The 30-second ad features fictional characters satirizing Ford.
A black woman notes that Ford “looks good,” and asks, “Isn’t that enough?” Others suggest Ford backs privacy for terrorists, accepts money from the pornography industry, wants to raise taxes and backs letting Canada deal with the North Korea nuclear threat.
The character who has raised complaints is a blonde, white woman who speaks in a hushed, suggestive tone and says that she met Ford at “the Playboy party.”
At the end of the ad, she reappears and purrs: “Harold, call me.” She winks and holds her hand to her ear as if holding a phone.
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 blacks to the GOP.
Ford’s Republican opponent, former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, has asked Tennessee television stations not to run the spot, calling it “over the top.” But the ad has continued to run -- and on Monday the Republican National Committee was unapologetic.
“I won’t even entertain the premise” that the ad is racially offensive, said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the GOP group. He said the allegation was “not fair and not serious and not accurate.”
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who is black, said Monday she was “shocked” by the ad. Brazile, 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.
“I took Ken at his word when he apologized,” Brazile said, referring to Mehlman’s 2005 speech. “But I guess he was hunting for votes then, and now they’re hunting to divide and distract and deceive. I didn’t realize they would revise the old strategy after apologizing.”
John Greer, 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.”
A new response ad by Ford that began airing Monday features the candidate, talking to the camera, accusing Corker of unleashing attacks rather than talking issues.
“If I had a dog,” Ford says, “he’d probably kick him, too.”
More uproar will get more attention, and more knowing where JR stands on things.
The horror! Of the whole parade of hysterical moonbat responses, this one deserves a special float all to itself. Apparently Professor Greer is terrified by the very thought of interracial sex. Apparently the professor would prefer the imposition of apartheid laws.