For two decades, going back to the Willie Horton ads of 1988,
we've heard liberals accuse Republicans of race-baiting. Throughout this
campaign, there have been endless whispers, suggestions and outright
accusations that GOP could/would play the race card because Obama is
half-black. Now Barack Obama has found his bizarre version of Willie Horton,
and it's . Rush Limbaugh.
Obama sneakily tried to air a Spanish-language TV ad telling
Latinos that Limbaugh thinks all Mexicans are stupid, Mexican immigrants
should all shut up and go home, and that Limbaugh and John McCain are
identical twins on immigration.
None of it is true. Now when Obama talks about reaching across
the aisle and healing a divided Washington, we'll fall to the ground
laughing.
How far we've come since January, when moderate McCain won in
South Carolina, and the liberal media were declaring that this showed that
Limbaugh and his right-wing views were politically dead. Tom Brokaw huffily
declared on "Meet the Press" that McCain's win showed Americans had rejected
"dogma" and were a "nomadic herd" hungering only for "solutions," something
conservatives apparently can't offer.
What Obama was trying to do in this ad, obviously, was play to
racial fears. "They want us to forget the insults we've put up with, the
intolerance," the ad announcer proclaimed in Spanish as a picture of Rush
Limbaugh appeared onscreen with quotes of him allegedly saying, "Mexicans
are stupid and unqualified" and "Shut your mouth or get out." The announcer
added: "They made us feel marginalized in a country we love so much."
From there, the Democrats turned to tie this phony cartoon of
Limbaugh to McCain: "John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces.
One that says lies just to get our vote, and another, even worse, that
continues the failed policies of George Bush that put special interests
ahead of working families."
The script first broke into the national media on a Washington
Post blog called The Trail. It was first corrected on an ABC News blog by
political reporter Jake Tapper. The mangled "Mexicans are stupid" quote came
from 1993, during debate over the NAFTA trade agreement, when Rush suggested
that America shouldn't worry about losing low-skill jobs: "let the unskilled
jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do -- let stupid and
unskilled Mexicans do that work."