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October 24, 2006

What next? "Harold the Pimp" attack ads?

GOP attack ad draws heat for racial overtones

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 a 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 E. Ford Jr. Ford is locked in a tight race, hoping to become the first African American 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 Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the country's oldest civil rights organization.

A former Republican senator, William S. Cohen of Maine, was more blunt. Cohen, who was also Defense secretary under President Clinton, said on CNN that the ad was "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 blond 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 says: "Harold, call me." She winks and holds her hand up 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 African Americans 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.

Posted by Mike at October 24, 2006 08:48 PM

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