Republicans expose racist, sexist hand—again

If Harold E. Ford Jr. wins his senatorial race next week, he will become the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate from a southern state since Reconstruction.

Ford, currently a U.S. representative for the 9th Congressional District in Tennessee, and his opponent, former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker, are vying for Sen. Bill Frist’s seat.

This upcoming election occurs more than four decades after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed poll taxes, onerous written exams and other methods employed by white supremacists to deny voting rights to the Black masses, largely in the South.

Ford, like most Democrats in Congress, has offered little opposition to Bush’s policies of preemptive war and regime change abroad or cuts in social services and loss of civil liberties at home. He is on record opposing abortion rights for women and same-sex marriage. He voted for the anti-flag-burning amendment. His reputation is as a “conservative Democrat.”

In the midst of this highly contested race, with the polls showing the two candidates neck and neck, operatives with the Republican National Committee released a television ad so racist, sexist and tawdry that public outrage forced its withdrawal from the airwaves. But not before it had been seen numerous times throughout Tennessee and then became a nationally viewed item on various forms of the mainstream media.

Sleazy, underhanded campaign ads are not uncommon in U.S. elections, which pit candidates from the two major capitalist parties against each other.

The highly provocative anti-Ford ad demands immediate attention because of its hyper-sexual imagery calculated to recall racist fears of relations between white women and Black men.

A scantily clad blonde actress in the ad says she met Ford at a “Playboy party” and then closes out the video with a coy wink, while sexily urging, “Harold, call me.”

Roots of racist imagery

Miscegenation laws outlawing inter-racial marriages and relationships are no longer on the books in Southern states formerly part of the Confederacy.

However, past and present false rape charges against Black men, which for decades resulted in lynchings, beatings and years in prison, remain an enduring legacy of slavery and white supremacist ideology.

The Ford television spot was financed by the Republican National Committee despite assurances by its chairperson, Ken Mehlman, to the 2005 NAACP Convention that the GOP would no longer use divisive tactics designed to reinforce racist stereotypes.

The GOP’s so-called “Southern strategy,” initiated more than 25 years ago during the Reagan campaign, honed in on the time-worn fears of white voters, largely in rural and small towns, of the social change that brought African Americans into higher paying jobs, decent neighborhoods and better-funded schools, and elected positions from which they had been previously systematically barred.

The “Willie Horton” 1988 Republican ad—featuring a Black parolee accused of raping and killing a white woman—became the prototype of this strategy. The campaign manager for George H.W. Bush, Lee Atwater, bragged that “by the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name.” (wikipedia.org)

This concept of both subtle and outright race-baiting led to the defeat of several Black politicians who had been expected to win their races, such as Henry Gantt in North Carolina. However, the issues most likely to be presented through this racist prism were jobs, affirmative action and crime.

Wal-Mart’s sordid role

The creator of the anti-Ford ad, Terry Nelson of Crosslink Strategy Group, was also on the payroll of the world’s largest retail store, Wal-Mart.

Nelson was hired in 2005 to help restore the company’s image after the truth about Wal-Mart’s anti-worker employment practices, cut-throat policies toward suppliers, and horrific conditions in their overseas plants came to light.

Labor and community organizations had successfully focused attention on the low wages, lack of affordable healthcare benefits, discriminatory hiring, promotion policies and unpaid overtime suffered by tens of thousands of workers while Wal-Mart reaped billions in profits.

Nelson was put in charge of a program designed to register Wal-Mart employees, many of whom are African Americans, so they could vote in the Nov. 7 election for candidates friendly to the company’s continued profitability.

Nelson’s key role in the blatantly racist Ford ad placed Wal-Mart in still another public relations nightmare. Under pressure, Nelson wrote a letter severing his relationship to the company. Nelson and his firms have also worked for President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain.

Faced with the prospect of losing control of one or both houses of Congress on Nov. 7, the Republican National Committee unleashed a putrid and racist ad in Tennessee in hopes that it could stir racial fears among a sufficient number of white voters to achieve Corker’s victory over Ford.

While the election result is not in as of this writing, what is undeniable is the continued reliance of the ruling class on racism to maintain its control of the political system.