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Monday, June 09, 2008

Now we'll see what Americans are made of
Posted by Jill | 5:56 AM
So...who am us, anyway?

Are we the people who really do want to see a color-blind society, where any child, black, white, Latino, female -- can dream of running for president? Or do we think the pre-Civil Rights era was just fine and dandy and that treating people differently because of the color of their skin is just fine and dandy? Have we come a long way in terms of living up to the idea that everyone is created equal, or are we as a society still shunning shaking the hands of black people, lest it "rub off"?

Floyd Brown, the creator of the infamous Willie Horton ad of 1988, is betting on the latter:

On a website he calls ExposeObama.com, Floyd G. Brown, the producer of the "Willie Horton" ad that helped defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, is preparing an encore.

Brown is raising money for a series of ads that he says will show Barack Obama to be out of touch on an issue of fundamental concern to voters: violent crime. One spot already on the Internet attacks the presumptive Democratic nominee for opposing a bill while he was an Illinois legislator that would have extended the death penalty to gang-related murders.

"When the time came to get tough, Obama chose to be weak. . . . Can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?" the video asks.

Though crime has taken a back seat in the presidential race to the war in Iraq and the economy, some Republicans think that Obama is vulnerable on this issue and hope to inject it into the campaign.

Obama and the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, have some sharply different views on crime, but the job of president has little to do with day-to-day law enforcement.

Brown and GOP strategists say such ads stimulate a debate on crime and punishment and may provide a window into the morality of a candidate.


This focus on "violent crime" seems to be a bit anachronistic in the face of a vanishing job market, $4 gasoline and skyrocketing fuel costs. On the surface, it sounds as if Floyd Brown is frozen in 1988, when people really were afraid of, as Mark Alan Stamaty wrote in a cartoon of that year depicting George H.W. Bush, "killer negroes are coming to get you". But what I fear is that Brown is simply ahead of the curve here.

We've already seen the demonization of Latinos as the job market has diminished, but mostly in that context. The Bush Administration tried the "Al Queda is Recruiting People in Latin America" thing, but that didn't fly. Latino has largely been the new black in terms of job fears, but with radio spots suddenly appearing that advertise locking caps to gas tanks, I think Floyd is betting that it's only a matter of time before desperate people start not just siphoning gas, but breaking into people's houses in search of money and food. When society collapses after people can no longer drive to jobs or heat their homes, and when high fuel costs and shortages mean food doesn't get to market, guess who Republican politicians are going to blame?

Hint: it isn't George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the party that got us into this mess in the first place.

(UPDATE: I just opened my e-mail, and apparently there is an e-mail going around showing photographs of Obama's relatives in Africa and photos of Obama in his childhood. I won't dignify the text by reprinting it here, and it really needs the accompanying images. But it clearly plays to Fears of a Black Planet. What's interesting about it, however, is that the subtext of this e-mail is much ire and huffing and puffing about Obama's alleged support for Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga -- which makes me want to do some more research into Kenyan politics, who's supporting whom, and what interests benefit from the dissemination of this trash, so stay tuned. My guess is that this e-mail was triggered by this June 1 article in the Baltimore Sun about the optimism that Kenyans feel about Obama's presidential prospects. There's clearly more here than I have time to investigate right now, but rest assured, I will. If you receive this e-mail, you'll know what we're up against.)

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