Remember Jesse Helms? I do. From North Carolina and able to keep his job as is state changed. Throughout the 1980s and 90s he was able to get the racist vote to put him over the top when he needed it. The most famous example is, of course, the infamous "White Hands" video that was run in 1990.
Here it is for your perusal".
The producer of the ad was Alex Castellanos</a, who had <a href="http://www.pbs.org/30secondcandidate/timeline/years/1990_c.html#castellanos">this to say about the infamous ad:
The message in that spot's very clear and that is nobody should get a job, or be denied a job because of the color of their skin. The vast majority of Americans believe that. And if it's wrong for us to discriminate that way it's wrong for our government to discriminate that way. Again, it's freedom. Now it wasn't very politically correct to say at the time but there's this, you know, you always get the assault logged against you that there's something, you know, when a conservative Republican says the same words that Martin Luther King says, somehow he's racist. And I just don't buy that. I think you're proscribed from talking about quotas and things like that because you're a, you're a white guy.
For those of you who have watched the ad, you may remember all of the elements of the ad scream "working class white guy gets stiffed". Castellanos has always defended the ad as a testimony to the truth that people shouldn't get jobs because minorities have to be hired due to quotas. The issue of "reverse discrimination" is a convenient way to gin up a lot of poor white anger. When times are tough, anger runs high, and you need to corral that energy. You find the way to do it. Racist resentments is a way.
Smash cut to 2010 and we have Scott Rigell, GOP candidate who is running for the House in VA in the 2nd Congressional district. I get the feeling that he's a good guy. I imagine I could, unlike a lot of neanderthals who run on as a Dem or GOP candidate for anyone I could have a good conversation with him. He seems like a Rayndian, which is unfortunately a pretty stupid way to justify your wealth. Whatever. I aint even in his district. I can't vote for Glenn Nye, his Dem opponent, and if I could I honestly don't know if I could support a Dem who voted against Health Care reform. In fact, Nye has conveniently painted himself as an "in-the-middle-blue-dog" Dem.
And that's the problem for Rigell: How to paint Nye as extreme. Well, you do that by association, right? You do that by saying "Hey, this white guy who seems like you actually hangs out with these minorities". And here's the ad that reveals the intention.
Now, when the effective first line of your ad is the same as an infamously racist ad from 20 years ago, well, you raise the warning signal. The fact that Pelosi "pops out" in the pink that is clearly accented through post production and she is paired with Obama... well, it gets interesting, right? His media campaign is being run by On Message, Inc.. Hired by mainly Conservative campaigns you can peruse a lot of their work on their video wall. I don't have the time to do all of the research, but it would be interesting to follow the connections and find who worked with him cause, well, I can hear the whistle.