Hey Pro...if the candidate himself wants the ad down, why can't it be pulled? Don't the republican honchos listen to their own candidates?
P.S...This ISN'T about Obama..relax.
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Tennessee ad ignites internal GOP squabbling
Corker calls for own party to pull spot some Republicans denounce as racist
With their majority in the Senate potentially hanging in the balance, Republicans were bickering among themselves over an advertisement in the particularly nasty campaign in Tennessee that even some Republicans have denounced as racist.
The dispute pitted former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, the GOP candidate for the seat held by Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, against his own party leadership Tuesday after it rebuffed his call to pull the ad, which lampoons Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s reputation as a man about town.
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.”
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.”
Ford told MSNBC-TV: “I know that they are a little desperate and doing the things that you do when you get desperate in a campaign.”
Corker 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.” |
