From today’s Politico:

The Democratic National Committee is seeking “Macaca” moments. The party today is opening a website, www.accountabilityproject.com, designed to recruit and display embarrassing audio and video of Republican candidates, as well as information about their schedules and copies of their mailers.

Campaigns have long made videotapes of each other, using “trackers” who follow the opposition from event to event. It was a young tracker who shot the video footage of then-Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) that wound up sinking his campaign.

The DNC hopes campaigns and journalists will use the footage in ads and news coverage. The site targets both 2010 candidates and 2012 hopefuls.

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It takes a lot to shock us Nevadan’s. We live in a state where gambling is open and legal. Prostitution is legal in some counties.  Taxi cabs are wrapped with pictures of strippers and ads promoting Las Vegas take great pride in telling visitors that they can come here, do what they want, go home and pretend like it never happened (What happens here, Stays here!).  You can’t tell me a little ol’ statement by Pinky from Searchlight (as Harry Reid called himself in a 2004 campaign ad) would set off a firestorm bloodier than a Mike Tyson ear bite. It has. It also sets up a bunch of spy vs. spy scenarios that would make Bugsy Segal proud.

In 2008, during the Barack Obama campaign for President, Reid said privately that it would help Obama that he was a “light-skinned”  African-American, and that Obama speaks “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”.  The quote is in the new book titled, “Game Change”. Reid has given all the apologies and I’m sure he hopes this all goes away quickly, there is that election coming up Nov. 2

Let’s get this out of the way. Harry Reid is not a racist. I’ve known him for 26 years and that is not a problem here. Of course, words have meaning. Republicans George Allen and Trent Lott had their political careers virtually destroyed for much less and Democrats worked overtime to create the impression that the words were enough to send then packing. In 2006, Allen was hammered non-stop for calling an opposition campaign worker, “macaca”. It took days for the media to figure out what a “macaca” was, but they would make sure it was enough to run Allen out of his Virginia Senate seat, destroy any chances he had at the White House, and give the Democrats a majority in the Senate.

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Saturday is my favorite day to read the newspaper. That’s the day reporters and editors print stories they know they have to cover but don’t want to get wide attention. The latest evidence for this theory is the Washington Post’s treatment of the revelation of remarks made by Sen. Harry Reid during the 2008 Presidential campaign:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) apologized today for referring to President Barack Obama as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect” in private conversations during the 2008 presidential campaign.

“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,” said Reid in a statement. “I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments.”

Poor choice of words? Exactly what other combination of words could Sen. Reid have used to convey his point? And what, exactly, was his point anyway? What was the relevance of these observations? We don’t have the full context for the remark in the Post’s reporting. It simply notes that Reid’s comments are revealed in a new book, “Game Change”, authored by reporters from Time and New York magazines.

Interesting that the two magazine reporters, Mark Halperin and John Heileman, have been sitting on their knowledge of Reid’s remarks for so long. Holding onto such a scoop to promote book sales would be understandable, except that the incident doesn’t even make it into the promotional blurb for the book. Just move along, nothing to see here.

Which got me thinking about Trent Lott.

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