Missed it by THAT much
Pete Hoekstra is
nearly giddy about all the attention his racist ad had garnered.
Hoekstra, a former Republican congressman from Holland, stood his ground Monday, saying the ad did what he wanted: It drew a clear contrast between himself and Democratic U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow. [...]
"We knew we were taking an aggressive approach on this, but we're in a time when people are fed up with the spending and we wanted to capture that frustration," Hoekstra said. "It hits Debbie smack-dab between the eyes on the area where she is most vulnerable."
Let's have a look at the headlines to see if he has, indeed, reshaped the conversation to talk about
Debbie Stabenow's spendthrift ways.
Yeah, Pete, you've really reshaped the conversation, alright. No question about it.
The Talking Points Memo piece that was also run in AnnArbor.com, has this interesting tidbit:
Washtenaw County, Michigan Commissioner Alicia Ping (R) says she was leaning toward endorsing former Rep. Pete Hoekstra in the Republican primary for Senate. But that’s all over now. On Monday, Ping donated money to Clark Durant, Hoekstra’s longshot rival in the primary. She told me she’d publicly endorse him if Durant asks her to.
Why the change of heart? Hoekstra’s controversial Super Bowl ad, which the Chinese-American Ping called “demeaning”, is a part of it. But it was more Hokestra’s refusal to acknowledge that he’d made a mistake running the ad that really lost him Ping’s support.
“If he didn’t know it was racist on some level, then shame on him,” Ping told me in a phone interview Monday night. “He didn’t apologize or say ‘maybe it was over the top’ or anything. He said, ‘I stand by what I believe in’ and, ‘the liberals are just making a bigger thing out of it.’ Well that’s not the case at all. It’s offensive and it’s racist. It’s demeaning to the Asian-American population.”
But we'll still have to listen to white people tell us how it's not racist. Yeesh.
On that topic, Dave Weigel, someone I normally like quite a bit, has this to say in his piece "With Negative Ad You Get Eggroll" at Slate.com:
Here's where Hoekstra loses me -- the poor-little-candidate act. He's not a racist, and only the slowest critics are saying he is. He's a Senate candidate looking for a way to stir up voter anger about the debt (which, according to exit polling in GOP primaries, is fading somewhat as an issue), and doing so with... an ad in which a smug Chinese lady brags about how she's going to bury us. (Is this going to happen before or after her ride on a hastily-built high-speed train?) He knows that a lot of Americans worry about this, possibly unreasonably so. And he's taking advantage of that. [emphasis mine]
This raises the question, "If someone does something racist, does that make them racist?" My answer: Yes, of course it does. Your mileage may vary but if you do something racist, in my book, that makes you a racist. Period. Sorry, Dave, you're wrong about this and that doesn't make me a "slow critic".
Cross-posted from Eclectablog.