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Banned
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Originally Posted by hiredgun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vZF5ZTu2Go
The video is an unbelievable and actually pretty funny attack ad on Harold Ford, a Democrat running for Senate in Tennessee. It's already caused quite a stir (see http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/...749189796.html)
I thought you'd all at least be amused by it. TFPolitics has been a divisive place lately, so let's try to keep the discussion here relatively light-hearted. Do you think the ad is inherently objectionable, and should be pulled? Do you agree with reports that it is racist?
As for myself, the ad is really too self-evidently silly for me to get worked up about it. It certainly didn't strike me as 'racist' when I saw it, and someone else had to explain to me why it was; then again, I didn't know anything about the candidates or the race. It does bother me, though, that having deployed such an ad, absolutely no one is at least taking responsibility for it.
Thoughts?
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...amused???? Let's look at the background...already covered in March, 2006 at TFP politics:
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<a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?p=2024271&mode=linear#post2024271">Poll: Are Blacks Tokens to Mask Intentionally Racist Republican Policy</a>
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http://www.nrsc.org/newsdesk/document.aspx?ID=1844
NRSC Launches FancyFord.com
Website Highlights Congressman Harold Ford, Jr.’s Fancy Lifesty
Washington, DC —Today the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) launched a new website, http://www.FancyFord.com. The site highlights Harold Ford, Jr.’s (D-TN) fancy lifestyle and lavish campaign spending habits—most of which are financed by his campaign contributors. After the site’s launch, the NRSC issued the following statement:
“From his voting record to his extravagant lifestyle, Fancy Ford simply does not represent the values of ordinary Tennesseans,” said Dan Ronayne, NRSC Press Secretary
Visitors to FancyFord.com are invited to learn how to live the fancy life, just like Harold Ford, Jr. The site allows you “party, shop, relax, and dine” like fancy Harold Ford. A few highlights:....
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Atwater Has Something to Prove;
William Raspberry. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Mar 13, 1989. pg. a.15
If students at Howard University are listening to what their elders are saying, they must be terribly confused.
They are being told, in tones that range from sadness to outrage, that they were naive, immature, self-centered and more than a little stupid to force the resignation of Lee Atwater from the Howard board of trustees.
Don't they understand that Howard needs money-for student financial aid, among other things-and that Atwater, the well-connected chairman of the Republican National Committee, could have delivered a good deal of it? Can't they see the puerile silliness of punishing their school, the flagship of American black higher education, in an effort to punish Atwater for his alleged offenses against black people?
And who is saying these things? Some of the same people who lately were decrying the cynicism of today's young people; their abandonment of idealism in favor of material interests.
The Howard students identify Atwater as the chief architect of last fall's often vicious presidential campaign. In particular they identify him with the cynical use of Willie Horton to make George Bush's soft-on-criminals case against Michael Dukakis. In their minds, the choice of Horton was calculated not merely to demonstrate the danger of Massachusetts' prison furlough program but also to put a black face on the danger.
Were they wrong about the double message of the Willie Horton TV ads? I think not. Were they wrong to identify Atwater with the message? Atwater says they were, and that is worth further discussion.
But if the students were right-if Atwater did appeal to white paranoia in order to get his man elected-how could they have been wrong to insist that he be removed from their university's board of trustees?
Atwater himself, in a long op-ed piece in The Post last Friday, devoted a single paragraph to the Willie Horton affair. "The ad in question," he wrote, "was an independent and unauthorized effort. In fact, Campaign Chairman James A. Baker III and I both wrote to the group responsible for it demanding that it be discontinued."
<b>But what came to be called "Hortonism" was not a single TV ad; it was a campaign. And Atwater seems to have been the campaign manager. "By the time this election is over," Atwater said last summer after he had come across the Horton case in Readers' Digest, "Willie Horton will be a household name."
</b>
Was the Horton campaign innocent of racial intent? Atwater insists that it was.
But the burden of his op-ed piece, like the responses I've been hearing to the student demonstration, was pragmatism. "I believed that I could be helpful to the university in fund raising, scholarship endowment, identifying job opportunities such as student internships at the White House and the Republican National Committee. I was especially pleased that I could help bring money into a university the overwhelming majority of whose students depend on tuition assistance to get their education. The fact is, I had a lot to offer Howard."
And so he did. But at what price?
Imagine, if you would, that David Duke, the ex-Klansman recently elected to the Louisiana legislature, were in position to make even more money and internships available to Howard students. Should Howard make him a trustee?
No, I don't equate Atwater with Duke, and I was pleased that Atwater and the GOP specifically renounced Duke as unfit for membership in the party.
The point is that only cynicism of the worst sort could lead a great institution to overlook the character and background of a candidate for trusteeship on the ground of his fund-raising ability.
Atwater says his racial attitudes have been misrepresented, and maybe they have. I give full credit to his efforts to bring more blacks into the Republican Party, and I do not count it against him that his decision to accept membership on the Howard board may have been in furtherance of that political end. There's nothing wrong with a little mutual exploitation.
But Atwater knows that, no matter how many good licks he managed in his joint concert with black blues singer-guitarist B. B. King, he is viewed with suspicion by blacks, primarily because of his role in the campaign.
He knows that it is up to him to prove that his critics have misjudged him. Black Americans, including the students at Howard, owe him the chance to offer that proof.
But it doesn't make sense to me that he should be allowed to make his case while he sits as a policy maker for the nation's preeminent black university. First the proof, then the honor.
Absent convincing evidence that he has been misjudged, Atwater should never have been named to the Howard board. Howard's trustees were wrong to put him there. Howard's students were right to insist on his removal.
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Originally Posted by host
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...42&postcount=2
....Elections are won on the margins, and the republican, "Southern Stratedy", was so successful in persuading white southerners to change from voting for democratic party candidates, to republicans, that in 1980:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater
.......Atwater on the Southern Strategy
As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to historian Alexander P. Lamis. Part of this interview was printed in Lamis' book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. Bob Herbert reported on the interview in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times. Atwater talked about the GOP's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. <b>All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…</b>
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N-word, N-word, N-word.' By 1968 you can't say 'N-word' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'N-word, n-word.'
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The terms "sun belt", and "Southern strategy", were coined, in 1969, by a 27 year old Harvard law grad and Nixon politcal advisor, Kevin Phillips. Phillips wrote the 1969 classic, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0870000586/sr=1-1/qid=1155024748/ref=sr_1_1/104-1219604-5159909?ie=UTF8&s=books">The emerging Republican majority,</a> and correctly predicted then, that the southern states would dominate American politics, and if California is included, no one has been elected POTUS since 1964, who was not born or residing in a southern state. Kevin Phillips later renounced the "new republican party" that he had advised so successfully. Here is an excerpt from comments by convicted Nixon watergate co-conspirator, Chuck Colson, who "found God" while serving jail time for his watergate crime conviction. Colson is trying to run "damage control" against the perceived impact of Kevin Phillips' new book,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067003486X/sr=1-1/qid=1155024479/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1219604-5159909?ie=UTF8&s=books">American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury</a>
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http://www.christianpost.com/article/20060805/23511.htm
The 'Threat' of Theocracy
Somebody Take a Chill Pill
By Chuck Colson
Christian Post Guest Columnist
Sat, Aug. 05 2006 10:04 AM ET
.....Whatever the exact terminology, the “threat” they describe is basically the same. Like my old White House colleague, the somewhat erratic Kevin Phillips, they fear an end to the separation of church and state and its replacement by a government directly based on biblical laws.
In Phillips’s account, biblical laws will not only decide social issues like abortion and same-sex “marriage” but also matters like economics, the environment, and foreign policy. His most lurid fear is that the United States, under the sway of “theocrats,” will take actions in the Middle East to hasten the second coming of Christ.
As I said, Phillips is hardly alone in his fears. In a new book Kingdom Coming, journalist Michelle Goldberg writes about what she calls “Christian nationalism.” This “nationalism,” which Goldberg characterizes as “quasi-fascist,” believes that “godly men have the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.”....
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It is amusing to read Colson's description of a political prodigy, accomplished and prolific author, and noted historian, as <b>"my old White House colleague, the somewhat erratic Kevin Phillips"</b>, when Colson is a convicted felon who "found Jesus", ......
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....Yawn....the same tired, bullshit....the same excuses.....but they'll keep doing it...because.....it works!
Last edited by host; 10-26-2006 at 07:16 AM..
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