A report by several scholars at the University of California at Berkeley predicts the emergence of race-baiting in the 2008 presidential campaigns and says e-mail, blogs, and Internet videos are likely to play a key role in such attacks.
The report—which lists as its lead authors Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the university’s law school, and David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy—acknowledges that no major race-baiting incidents have occurred in the presidential campaigns so far. But, based on an analysis of a dozen elections since 1983, the paper argues that appeals to racial bigotry are likely, especially if Barack Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee.
“It’s not only Barack Obama who will have to combat race-based tactics,” Mr. Edley, an Obama supporter, said in a statement accompanying the report. “Any politician who backs positions that appeal to minority voters is vulnerable.”
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Kirp rejected the idea that Senator Obama will somehow be insulated from race-based attacks by being regarded part of a new generation of black candidates who do not make their race an issue. The professor pointed to the case of former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford, of Tennessee, who, he says, was thought of in similar terms and “did everything he could” to avoid making race a central issue in his 2006 campaign for the Senate. The outcome was uncertain as late as two weeks before the election, but Mr. Ford fell behind after his Republican opponent, Bob Corker, ran a radio ad alleging that Mr. Ford had attended a party featuring Playboy Playmates, and a television ad in which a scantily clad white woman suggestively urged Mr. Ford to call her. The report by the Berkeley scholars says the ad “tapped into deep-seated white fears regarding sex between races.”
In an effort to be bipartisan, the authors also seek to make clear that Democrats can race-bait as well. The report takes New Orleans’s black mayor, Ray Nagin, to task for winning re-election in 2006 by mobilizing black voters with racial appeals, including a plea to restore New Orleans’s reputation as “Chocolate City.”
