Democrats Counter GOP’s Black Radio Scam-paign

Democrats are going “toe to toe” against a Republican campaign to pollute Black-oriented media, principally radio, with negative and voter suppression ads in key “battleground” states, say officials at the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The official Democratic counterattack has been hugely reinforced by multibillionaire George Soros’s independent “527” outfit, The Media Fund, which will spend $5 million on Black-oriented media between now and election day. The Media Fund has already spent $43 million on ads with themes ranging from “Ohio Outsourced” to “No Oil Company Left Behind,” “Bush and Halliburton” and “It’s About Jobs.”

According to Clifford Franklin, president of St. Louis-based The Fuse, the agency that created the Black ads, the Soros-financed media campaign is “aimed particularly at those who have an extremely cynical view of the political process” – that is, African Americans between the ages of 18 and 35. The message: “Don’t keep getting played”

The ads skillfully focus audience attention on the race-based character of Bush’s policies and popular base, in hard-edged, straightforward language. Some key phrases:

“Bush said he would leave no child behind. But he wasn’t talking about your child.”

“Bush said prosperity was right around the corner, but he wasn’t talking about the corners in your neighborhood.”

The GOP has already targeted Blacks in many of these same “battlefield states” (see , “Bush’s Black Attack Dogs,” September 2) with media buys on some of the same stations. Soros’s team directly confronts the intensifying Republican efforts to suppress the Black vote.

“The Republicans want you to sit out this election and simply stay home…. Who are they fooling? These are the same folks that are against affirmative action, oppose civil rights. These are the same people against raising the minimum wage. And want to take away overtime pay…. Under Bush, 1.1 million more black folks live in poverty than they did before 2001.”

“Don’t keep getting played”

Washington Post media analyst Howard Kurtz, playing the usual corporate media game, claims the ad “contains some exaggerations. The administration has not proposed weakening civil rights laws and is seeking to eliminate overtime only for certain employment categories.” Objectively, Kurtz is dead wrong. Affirmative action is a civil rights issue, as is the Patriot Act. Failure to enforce civil rights laws is the same as opposing civil rights, as is nominating anti-civil rights judges to the federal courts. Kurtz sets himself up as an arbiter of the boundaries of civil rights. By his standards, Bush would have to oppose the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 to qualify as an anti-civil rights president!

Although federal law requires that political parties and their candidates build a “firewall” between their operations and those of partisan “527s,” the Democratic National Committee’s concurrent Black ad lineup compliments the Soros effort. Here’s one of the DNC ads, voiced by a male announcer:

“George Bush misled the American people into a war in Iraq that is draining billions of our tax dollars. While our women and men in the armed forces are re-building Iraq, weapons of mass destruction can be found right here at home in [STATE].

“For 20 years, John Kerry has fought for civil rights, economic opportunity and fairness. That’s why the Congressional Black Caucus honored him in 2002. That’s why the NAACP recently gave John Kerry a 100% approval rating.

“On November 2nd, vote to make a change in the White House. Vote John Kerry for president.”

This is a strong, yet carefully balanced DNC ad, including negative Bush and positive Kerry narrative. Even Howard Kurtz could not disapprove.

The Republican National Committee’s “Black gun,” former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts, denounced the Soros ads. Acting like Aaron Burr instigating his duel with Alexander Hamilton, Watts howled:

”I will challenge anyone to debate me on Bush’s record, versus Senator Kerry’s record on issues that directly impact my community, including support for Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU’s), faith-based initiatives, minority business development, and health care disparities.

”John Kerry has no record with the black community, and so his supporters in these shadow groups are launching more of the same unfounded, negative, and personal attacks against George W. Bush.

Soros is no “shadow.” He’s a high profile billionaire whose determination to topple Bush is well known. And he hasn’t established any African American “front” groups to “Blackwash” his money. It’s the Republicans who have a lock on “shadow” groups, such as People of Color United, the Black front for white Republican insurance mogul J. Patrick Rooney’s money. Washington DC school vouchers activist Virginia Walden-Ford, who has been bankrolled for years by the most rightwing foundations in the nation, broadcast a package of classic Black voter suppression ads in “battleground” states, last month. As we wrote in our September 2 issue, the ads were “as dishonest and cynical an example of campaign poison as have ever been broadcast on Black-oriented radio. The ad wasn’t pro-Republican, it was anti-Black voting.” Here are some excerpts:

“John Kerry for president? How is it we don’t know anything about this guy? You’d think someone who has been in office for 22 years, we’d know why he’s supposed to be our savior. What’s Kerry done for us? …Our community doesn’t need another wishy-washy, rich, white politician. And boy, does Kerry come across as rich, white and wishy-washy…”

“His wife says she’s an African American. While technically true, I don’t believe a white woman, raised in Africa, surrounded by servants, qualifies…”

In an August 16 interview on the Tavis Smiley public radio show, Walden-Ford seemed to claim authorship of the ad:

Host Tony Cox: “The matter of using race [in the ads] – was that the idea of Black people in the organization, or the whites?”

Walden-Ford: “This is my opinion, this is the opinion of those who are around me in the African American community…. If anybody was wondering – it was me.”

A shadowy Republican-Right outfit called America’s Pac Campaign took to the Black-oriented airwaves this month in contested mid-Western states. could find no evidence of America’s Pac Campaign ever having previously existed. According to Dayton, Ohio radio station WRNB-FM sales records, the group’s president and treasurer is Richard Nadler, of Overland Park, Kansas, but Nadler delivers his message through a Black voice on the radio:

“Today one-third of African American pregnancies end in abortion Black babies are terminated at rates triple of white babies.

Under title X Schools can counsel scared kids to abort their babies without even consulting their parents.

Each year the abortion mill diminish the human capacity of our community by another 400,000 souls.