Day: September 13, 2008

“Disrespectful” was a powerful word in the Jim Crow era. Like “uppity,” it had a special meaning when used to describe the behavior of African Americans. A black man who was thought to be disrespectful to a white man risked being beaten. A black man who was disrespectful to a white woman could well end up dead.

Here’s what the female announcer in John McCain’s new ad says:

ANNOUNCER: He was the world’s biggest celebrity. But his star is fading. So they lashed out at Sarah Palin. Dismissed her as “good looking.” That backfired. So they said she was doing “what she was told.” Then desperately called Sarah Palin a liar. How disrespectful. (Emphasis added.)

First of all, the fact that Palin is an audacious and extravagant liar has been clearly established. Starting with her convention speech, she has repeatedly lied about the fact that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere and sold a plane on Ebay, just for starters.

The matronly indignation voiced by the new ad’s announcer juxtaposed with the visual of Obama’s face in profile next to the words “how disrespectful” reads loudly and clearly to the ad’s target demo, the racist GOP base. And yet the messaging is apparently too subtle for the punditocracy — even though this same group spent endless hours last week debating whether Obama’s “lipstick” remark was sexist or not. Let’s review Obama’s statement, just for grins:

OBAMA: Let’s just list this for a second. John McCain says he’s about change, too. Except — and so I guess his whole angle is, “Watch out, George Bush, except for economic policy, health-care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics. We’re really gonna shake things up in Washington.” That’s not change. That’s just calling some — the same thing, something different. But you know, you can — you know, you can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.

Despite the fact that Obama never referred even indirectly to McCain’s vice presidential nominee — and the equally confounding fact that the nominee has repeatedly compared herself to a female dog in lipstick (pig is bad, but bitch is okay?) — the Rove element in the McCain campaign has successfully recast Obama’s statement as sexist, at least in the empty minds of Fox News viewers.

The racist coding in the McCain ad is more subtle than the infamous “hands” ad that Sen. Jesse Helms, the proud North Carolina bigot who gave McCain senior adviser Charlie Black his start, ran against Harvey Gantt, the architect and former mayor of Charlotte who was African American. The “hands” ad showed the hands and arms of a white man crumpling up a notice he’d received that his job had been given to a less-qualified “minority.”

But the intended effect of the McCain ad is the same — to stoke the flames of racial hatred and fear among voters at the heart of the Republican base.