The Race Card

Jeff Jacoby has a column in today's Boston Globe that rips apart the all-to-frequent use of the race card these days. His point is that this is a weapon that degrades the wielders of it as much as it hurts who it is directed at. It is also demeaning to the voters. He's right.

The 2006 edition of racial McCarthyism features TV ads, too. But this time it is the ads themselves — and by extension the Republicans they are meant to benefit — that are being falsely smeared as racist.

In Tennessee, the GOP aired a commercial poking fun at Harold Ford, the black Memphis congressman who is battling with former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker to succeed Bill Frist in the US Senate.

The ad parodies several of Ford's political positions through mock interviews with people defending or agreeing with him. "Terrorists need their privacy," a woman indignantly insists. "Ford's right," says a hunter , "I do have too many guns." A Wilford Brimley look-alike declares, "Canada can take care of North Korea — they're not busy." And a bare-shouldered bimbo squeals, "I met Harold at the Playboy party" — a reference to Playboy's 2005 Super Bowl bash in Florida, which Ford attended. The ditzy blonde returns at the end to whisper, with a wink, "Harold: call me!"

It was a witty, entertaining ad — and it promptly had liberals and Democrats and even the odd Republican screeching about how "racist" it was. The NAACP issued a press release calling it "racially charged political propaganda" akin to "Birth of a Nation," D. W. Griffith's paean to the Ku Klux Klan. Slate described it as an "attempt to inflame white bigotry about interracial relationships and white fears of black male sexuality." Vanderbilt University professor John Geer breathlessly told AP: "I've not met any observer who didn't immediately say, 'Oh, my gosh!' It was a race card."

Senator McCarthy, call your office.

I'm already on the record about that ad. It was not racist despite all the screaming and steaming that tried to paint it that way. Jacoby makes one irrefutable point that proves it is not racist: it would have been exactly as effective no matter what race the candidate was. Think about that. It would have been effective regardless of race.

The thing about the people who are quick to raise the race card is that their first thought is about race. That is not how it is supposed to be nor the way it should be. I honestly never even thought of Harold Ford, Jr. as a black politician. I thought of him (still do, by the way) as a politician. His race is completely irrelevant, at least to me. Isn't that how it is supposed to be?