North Carolina Republicans Willie Horton Obama In Ads

April 24th, 2008

Two ads, read about both:

    First from the Washington Post

    North Carolina Republican Party Invokes Wright

    Throwing subtlety out the window, the North Carolina Republican Party began airing an ad today that seeks to tie the two Democrats running for governor to Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and, by extension, to Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

    The Post continues…

    Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has insisted he will not engage in personal attacks on either Obama or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) quickly sought to distance himself from the ad.

    In a letter to the chairwoman of the North Carolina Republican Party, McCain asked her to take the ad down — a request the party has not yet complied with.

Then to come in North Carolina:

    The Nation reports that

    Republicans are sharpening their knives against Barack Obama. No smear is too insignificant to broadcast. According to Time Magazine’s Michael Scherer, Floyd Brown, the creator of the infamous Willie Horton ad–credited with sinking Michael Dukakis’s candidacy in 1988–is launching a new ad campaign against Obama.

    Scherer reports that Brown “has started four organizations to serve as front groups, plans to blast out a fundraising email to between 3 and 7 million conservatives, and debuted his first ad, which tries to argue that Obama is weak on crime, and therefore weak on terrorism.”

    The ad, set to run in North Carolina, all-but accuses Obama of murder.

    Writes Scherer:

    The new ad recounts the deaths of three Chicago residents in 2001 at the hands of criminal gangs. “That same year, a Chicago state senator named Barack Obama voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders,” an ominous female narrator intones. “So the question is, can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?”

    It’s tempting to ignore material this fringy and disgusting. But since the ad is likely to spread across the media, particularly in conservative circles, some context is in order.

    In 2001, when Obama voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders, the practice itself was widely discredited in the state of Illinois. The state’s Republican Governor, George Ryan, placed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, after 13 men on death row were found to be innocent and cleared of the accused crimes. The sentences of 156 death row inmates were subsequently commuted in 2003. “This is shaping up to be one of the great civil rights struggles of our time,” Ryan said. That same year, the right-leaning Chicago Tribune editorial page won a Pulitzer for its series of editorials against the death penalty…

    The new ad, of course, is intending to scare, not inform.

I told you all in my last post what Michael Dukakis says about his own foolishness in sitting back and letting George Bush and Floyd Brown Willie Horton him. Let’s see if Obama will FINALLY learn a 20 year old lesson, as apparently he has not so far.

Edited to add: I now have the Willie Horton Commercial

Popularity: 4% [?]


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4 Responses to “North Carolina Republicans Willie Horton Obama In Ads”

  1. Urban Thought on April 24th, 2008 3:58 pm | link

    If we fail to do our research and accept info within a video as fact we will be led astray.

    Thank you for informing us of the truth and giving us the tools to further investigate what people present to us as factual information.

  2. D. Yobachi Boswell on April 24th, 2008 4:24 pm | link

    Urban Though, unfornately most people are not like you and they will accept a video as fact and not seek truth; especially if it appeals to their fears or pre-assumed prejudices.

    That’s why Barack better learn to start responding, and start writing his own narrrative. He claims he’s all of a sudden going to get tough with the republicans; we’ll here goes round one - show and prove!

  3. JD on April 25th, 2008 4:15 pm | link

    It is all about race and North Carolina plays that card hard. Harvy Gantt was done in by an add implying that a white family lost their job to a black man, the result, 6 more years of Jesse Helms. Keep in mind, it may be the Republicans responsible for this attack, but the party of the people and the “First Black President,” Bill Clinton started this. This campaign has become a strong wake up call for Black America.

  4. D. Yobachi Boswell on April 25th, 2008 6:18 pm | link

    I’m glad for this campaign for nothing else than for the fact that some Black folks becoming de-mystified at least some about the democrats, the Clinton’s and condescending white liberals in general.

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