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Opinion

Ad campaigns focus on race

David Salinas 
Opinion Columnist 

This election cycle, like those before it, has seen politicians play on fears rooted in racial bias to garner those last few votes. It's not a new tactic, but it's still never acceptable. "You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968, you can't say ‘nigger' -- that hurts you … So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff." 

That is the late Lee Atwater describing what Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips dubbed the "Southern Strategy." In 2005, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for Republicans use of this strategy.

Before 1964, Republicans like Barry Goldwater, who co-founded Arizona's NAACP, believed in states' rights. However, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed discrimination, the phrase "states' rights" and the mention of issues like busing and affirmative action became code words for some southerners who still saw "race" as a problem. 

In 2006, for at least two campaigns, racism is still a viable option. 

Last week, the close U.S. Senate race in Tennessee took an ugly turn when national Republicans paid for a television ad that played on old fears of the past -- fears they still hope to stoke today.

The ad features several people attacking Harold Ford's character, but the focus of the controversy is on the white actress depicting a "Playboy bunny." 

In the middle of the ad she squeals, "I met Harold at the Playboy party!" It would have been fine if they had left it there but at the end of the ad she reappears saying, "Harold, call me" and then winks. 

The ad was meant to anger those who are opposed to "miscegenation" or interracial-dating. When Mehlman was asked to take it down, at first, he said he couldn't because it was against the law to contact the ad makers. 

Although the national Republican Party paid for this ad, once it gave the independent group the money, it no longer had "control" of what happened to the ad. 

Therefore, no one in the party has to take the blame, similar to the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in 2004. Bob Corker gets to play the "good cop" and ask for it to be taken down. The ad then airs for a couple of days and gets in the news because of the sensationalism, and the party rescinds it. 

But the damage is done, whatever anxieties some had are now rekindled, and Corker has to hope they remain for the next week.

As bad as this was, the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts is even worse.

Lieutenant Gov. Kerry Healey must have thought the road to the Massachusetts governorship would be a lot easier. 

When she found herself down by double digits to political neophyte and African American Deval Patrick, she panicked and tried to take an unfortunate shortcut. 

Healy, a woman, has chosen to attack Patrick by associating him with rape. Two weeks ago, it was leaked to the conservative newspaper, the Boston Herald, that in 1993, Patrick's brother-in-law Bernard Sigh was convicted of raping his estranged wife, Patrick's sister. 

Although they would later reconcile and are still married today, the Herald thought it was newsworthy that Sigh had to register with the state, using the headline "Rapist Kin Put on Notice." 

This news coincided with two of Healey's ads dealing with rape.

"If Deval Patrick had his way, a thug who bound a 59-year-old woman and repeatedly raped her would be free." Patrick, one-time civil rights attorney, defended an indigent Hispanic client and paid for the DNA test that would prove his guilt. 

OK, let's say it was a fair criticism, albeit without context, but she decided one rape ad was not enough. The second ad featured a white woman -- note it was not a Hispanic, Asian or African America woman -- in a dimly lit parking garage with the camera slowly stalking her from behind. 

A voiceover accused Patrick of "praising" a rapist and then shows a short clip of Patrick and pauses on his face; the ad cuts back to the woman in the parking garage abruptly turning around as if she is about to be attacked, and the following words appear on screen, "Have you ever heard a woman compliment a rapist?" After this onslaught, Patrick now has a 25-point lead in the most recent poll. 

What is most frustrating about racial wedge issues is that "race" is a myth. We weren't divinely created into specific categories. Race is a manmade invention that was once used -- and still is -- to build some sort of natural caste system. We are all the same; that's not meant as some gesture towards unity -- it is a biological fact. 

The only reason physical features differ is because of geography. Melanin decreases the further you move from the equator. God gave us this earth and placed us here in equality, and we've spent every second since dividing ourselves. This country doesn't need leaders who continue that division.

Send comments to dccampus@mail.uh.edu