The Stinging WASP

Midterm elections! Nasty politics! Tasteless political ads! Need I say more?

Well, in a word - YES!

Usually it is one party criticizing the other about all the negative ads and all of the so called mudslinging. But this year we get an early Halloween treat. We actually have fighting between the Republicans and the Republicans.

It seems that an ad for the GOP candidate recently ran in a particularly nasty campaign in Tennessee that has pissed off more than a few Democrats. It has pissed off the GOP's as well.

First a little history lesson. GOP stands for the "Grand Old Party." And you can be sure that the majority of the "old party members" were in fact WHITE. In fact there is a name for them too. The GOP party members are usually called WASP's which is an acronym for White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant. Also, the majority of GOP's tend to be white, conservative and wealthy. Just like the plantation owners of the 1800's.

But I digress so back to the ad. In the ad, a young white actress playing the stereotype of a “dumb blonde” talks about meeting Ford, a 36-year-old bachelor who is black, “at the Playboy party.” At the end of the ad, she winks and says to the camera, “Harold — call me.”

Now of course Tennessee is in the South and Harold Ford, the Democratic candidate, is Black. One has to wonder why the woman in the commercial was white rather than black. And one has to wonder what exactly they are insinuating with the "wink" and the "call me."

The ad brought immediate criticism from the Ford campaign and the NAACP, whose Washington office called it “a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.”

I agree and so does the Republican candidate. Bob Corker, Ford's opponent, himself called the ad “distasteful” Tuesday, telling MSNBC-TV, “I think it ought to come down.” Meanwhile, Bill Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine, criticized it in an interview on CNN as “a very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.”

But of course the Republican National Committee (RNC) sees it differently.