Polimom has a couple of blind-spots, and one of them surfaces right here:
WASHINGTON — A new Republican Party television ad featuring a scantily clad white woman winking and inviting a black candidate to “call me” is drawing charges of race-baiting, with critics saying it contradicts a landmark GOP statement last year that the party was wrong in past decades to use racial appeals to win support from white voters.
Critics said the ad, which is funded by the Republican National Committee and has aired since Friday, plays on fears of interracial relationships to scare some white voters in rural Tennessee to oppose Democratic Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. Ford is locked in a tight race, hoping to become the first African American senator since Reconstruction to represent a state in the former Confederacy.
The ad is here (having trouble with the embedding — sorry).
There’s a real ruckus being raised about this, but it’s going right over my head, folks. I found absolutely nothing in there that smacked of racism… and on race relations, my sensitivity meter generally takes very little pressure to set off alarms.
However, I’ve run into other disconnects in the past. The last time it happened (here and here), I concluded that there are some things that are targeted so far away from where I’m standing, I’m never gonna get it. Maybe this is one of those?
Unlike me, of course, there are plenty of folks who have no trouble seeing the problem. Joe Gandelman, for example, says:
And what’s the subtext here? You don’t have to be p.c. or a liberal to conclude […]: it’s saying to voters “he likes white women.”
I have enormous respect for Joe’s opinion, but he lost me on this; that’s not what the ad said to me at all. I saw “he went to a party that was hosted by a company often associated with women of loose morals“. Her skin color just didn’t hit me.
Was the ad playing deliberately to this? (WaPo)
“Oh, sure, there’s some prejudice,” Layne said as he contemplated casting a ballot for a black man. “I wouldn’t want my daughter marrying one.” But he’s more concerned about rising medical costs: When it comes to voting, “you gotta look at the person, not the color.”
[snip]
But statewide office seemed beyond [Ford’s] reach in Tennessee, a state with a history of racially divided voting where Republicans had won recent Senate races.
Is this really a target in 2006?
Folks, if there are actually white voters in Tennessee — or anywhere else — who saw this deliberately-designed floozy and thought, “Oh my goodness! That scary black man might try to deflower our innocent damsels”, Polimom thinks they’re ignorant beyond belief.
Have we hit a big Polimom blind-spot?
James Joyner is another thoughtful writer who took a serious look at the ad (and other analyses), and tried to understand things, but partially concluded:
Two problems with that analysis, though. First, as noted above, the Ford-Playboy thing is a GOP talking point in this campaign. Second, the type of voter who still doesn’t know whether he supports Ford or Coker at this late stage of the game is what we in the business call a “moron.” These tend not to be people with a mastery of complex symbolism.
Of course, you know — sometimes a rose really is just a rose (and a floozy is just a floozy).
Is it just me? What did you think when you saw the ad?