Willie Horton Lives

If one thing has been true about post-Civil War politics in America, it's that one of the most tried and true ways to win a campaign is by attacking and scapegoating hated and feared minority groups. The tactic was especially clear in the South throughout the reign of Jim Crow laws, and Ronald Reagan brought it into the modern era by kicking off his "states rights"-themed 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers. George H.W. Bush and and his political guru Lee Atwater perfected the "Ohmygawd minorities are so scary!!" technique with their infamous 1988 Willie Horton ads, attacking Michael Dukakis' purported "softness on crime" with the image of a black convict. Not to be outdone, Bush Jr. and Karl Rove (who, alas, still hasn't hit his getting-terminal-cancer-and-repenting phase the way Atwater did) used the specter of scary gay people to get idiotic, churchgoing Ohioans to vote Bush in 2004.

Sadly, I've seen two examples in the last few days that this kind of politics isn't going away.

This weekend, Howard Dean delivered a speech in Phoenix suggesting that Republicans would use immigrants as their scary minority du jour to try to win the 2006 elections. He's absolutely right, and he should make no apologies for it. He correctly pointed out that they used gays to scare voters in 2004, and that all the signs point to a growing anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic campaign to capture Congress next year. Democrats who are willing to defend immigrants' rights had better be prepared for attacks ads showing their faces next to those of scary Hispanic criminals.

A new group called Coalition for a Secure Driver's License just launched a website and a series of billboard ads in North Carolina, with more planned in New Mexico. Their goal, according to their website, is "to advocate tighter identification requirements for individuals seeking driver's licenses within the 50 states, in order to prevent future terrorists from obtaining that critical form of ID." That all sounds fine with me. While I'm typically weary of allegedly anti-terrorism security measures, this doesn't sound so bad. Their website, however, is filled with images of hijackers and scary-looking olive-skinned men glaring at the viewer. Worse, check out the billboard design they're using to push this seemingly reasonable demand for reform:


Read: Scary, scary A-rabs. With weapons. And with those crazy things them Muzz-Lim people wear on their heads, just like them scary Eye-Rack-Ees what I seen on TV.

The politics of racism and fear just don't get much worse than this. The coalition got a couple of actors (probably white people under that clothing) to dress up like Iraqi insurgents. And they superimposed those images over an image of a quiet North Carolina mountain highway, much like the ones that drivers looking at the billboards will probably be on. On top of that, they used a bunch of Arabic letters at the top of the billboard for no particular reason, other than to add to the scary, foreign appearance of it all. Still worse, they didn't even connect the letters properly, indicating that the racist idiots responsible for this ad just found an Arabic textbook and copied some of the funny-looking characters.

The only connection North Carolina has to recent terrorism is that of Eric Randolph, the Christian terrorist who set off bombs at an abortion clinic, a gay nightclub, and the 1996 Summer Olympic opening ceremonies. But guess what? An image of a good ol' white boy isn't going to scare people in North Carolina (or anywhere, for that matter), so they trotted out pictures of people dressed up like Arab terrorists. Even if I agreed with their call for more restrictive licensing, I'd never want anything to do with a group like this. Its members, who include 9/11 family members, need to drop this racist fear campaign and use calm, rational arguments to make their case.