The GOP and race baiting: they just can't help themselves

The Year Of Playing Dirtier

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 27, 2006; A01

[..]

• In two dozen congressional districts, a political action committee supported by a white Indianapolis businessman, J. Patrick Rooney, is running ads saying Democrats want to abort black babies. A voice says, "If you make a little mistake with one of your hos, you'll want to dispose of that problem tout de suite, no questions asked."
  
  
• In the most controversial recent ad, the Republican National Committee slammed Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) for attending a Playboy-sponsored Super Bowl party. In the ad, a scantily clad white actress winks as she reminisces about good times with Ford, who is black.

[..] The Playboy ad bashing Ford [..] is a typical product of the attack politics of 2006. Its beneficiary, GOP Senate candidate Bob Corker, called it "tacky" but said he cannot do anything about an RNC ad. Even RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman said he is powerless to stop it; it is an "independent expenditure" of the RNC, out of the committee's control. He doesn't seem too upset about it, though. Corker has been rising in the polls since it started airing.

America's PAC
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=America's_Pac

"The IRS filing indicates that the America's PAC ads are running this year in 10 battleground states, including Ohio, New Mexico, and Nevada" [writes Newsmax].

"The campaign discusses issues ranging from warrantless wiretapping to school choice, but the most inflammatory spots pertain to abortion," Josh Gerstein reported in the New York Sun, October 17, 2006.

"'Black babies are terminated at triple the rate of white babies,' a female announcer in one of the ads says, as rain, thunder, and a crying infant are heard in the background. 'The Democratic Party supports these abortion laws that are decimating our people, but the individual's right to life is protected in the Republican platform. Democrats say they want our vote. Why don't they want our lives?'," Gerstein reported.

"Another ad," Gerstein wrote, "features a dialogue between two men.

"'If you make a little mistake with one of your "ho's", you'll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked,' one of the men says. "'That's too cold. I don't snuff my own seed,' the other replies. "'Maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican,' the first man says.

"Another spot attempts to link Democrats to a white supremacist who served as a Republican in the Louisiana Legislature, David Duke," Gerstein wrote. "The ad makes reference to Duke's trip to Syria last year, where he spoke at an anti-war rally.

"'I can understand why a Ku Klux Klan cracker like David Duke makes nice with the terrorists,' a male voice in the ad says. 'What I want to know is why so many of the Democrat politicians I helped elect are on the same side of the Iraq war as David Duke.'"

Nadler's Access Advertising of Kansas City, Missouri, is the agency handling the 2006 ads. "Brad Furnish, chief economist at Access, said black voters will benefit from the extra attention," Johnson wrote. "These ads are being sponsored by a political action committee that is conservative but not Republican," Furnish told Johnson.

A little further background on [this] repulsive ad [..]: The man funding it, J. Patrick Rooney, is the former chairman of Golden Rule Insurance Co. and current chairman of Medical Savings Insurance Co. For more than a decade he has been the nation's single biggest proponent of medical savings accounts and health savings accounts -- giving (literally) millions of dollars in contributions to the Republicans who, in turn, passed laws creating the accounts. (Needless to say, Rooney's companies, which both specialize in the accounts, have benefited enormously.)

NAACP: Tenn. Senate ad plays to racism

Wed Oct 25

A political TV ad targeting a black candidate for Senate contains what critics, including the NAACP, are calling racist sexual innuendo about a black man and white woman.

The Republican National Committee ad began airing Friday and features a series of characters facetiously declaring their support for Democrat Harold Ford Jr., a Memphis congressman who faces Republican Bob Corker, who is white, in the Nov. 7 election. Polls have shown the two locked in a tight race.

In the ad, a blond white woman brags, "I met Harold at the Playboy party." At the end she looks into the camera, holds her hand like a telephone and says, "Harold, call me," before winking.

The line is an apparent reference to Ford's attendance at a Playboy Super Bowl party in Jacksonville, Fla., last year.

"I was there. I like football, and I like girls," Ford said Tuesday.

"I don't think they're doing it to talk about the goodness of me or the goodness of my opponent," Ford said. "They want to scare people about me."

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People criticized the ad.

"It is a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women," Hilary Shelton, head of the Washington NAACP office, told the Los Angeles Times.

The Corker campaign denounced the ad, saying it is "tacky, over the top and is not reflective of the kind of campaign we are running."

RNC spokesman Danny Diaz has defended the ad's accuracy and said it will run its full course. It cost $457,944 to buy the time for the ad, according to Federal Election Commission filings. [..]

Former Clinton Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, also a former Republican senator from Maine, said on CNN that the ad was "a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment."