Barack Obama warned last week that John McCain and the Republican Party would launch racist attacks against him, an allegation repeated by Kathleen Sibelius, rumored to be on his short list for VP. However, the party that has launched the first and rather unsubtle attack on ethnicity aren’t Republicans, but Democrats in Washington. In an attack ad that accuses Dino Rossi of too-close ties to the building industry, the Democrats added the theme song from The Sopranos, just in case anyone missed the fact that Rossi has Italian ancestry:
Wow. Just … wow. I guess we can give credit to the Washington Democratic Party in that they never actually say the word “Mafia”, but they don’t leave much to the imagination. Christine Gregoire barely won her last election against Rossi in an election filled with suspicions of voter fraud, and the suspects weren’t the Italians.Brian Faughnan writes at the Weekly Standard:
In a year where Democrats see racist appeals everywhere, it’s stunning that they would introduce an ad that plays on ethnic stereotypes in such an obvious way. Can you imagine the reaction if Republicans produced an anti-Obama ad with rap music playing in the background?
It’s not just stunning, it’s stunningly hypocritical. While Obama accuses McCain and his team of being racists without a shred of evidence for the charge, and while a sitting Governor of Kansas echoes that sentiment without any support whatsoever, the Democrats have no problem leveraging anti-Italian bigotry to paint their opponent as a mobster.
Since Obama made such an issue of this in Florida, will he condemn this eruption of bigotry from Democrats?
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