Republican senator and noted frequenter of American prostitutes David Vitter is running for governor of Louisiana. Since he is a Republican and a conservative, this means
cutting an ad about
scary "thug" people coming to murder you all.
An ominous-sounding announcer, whose voice is played over a crackly soundtrack, warns that Edwards would release "5,500 dangerous thugs" as it shows an image of a black man in the foreground as a white man sips from a beer bottle behind him. After the word "thugs" was used to describe rioters in Baltimore earlier this year, Columbia University professor John McWhorter told NPR that "thugs" is a "sly way of saying, 'there go those black people ruining things again.'"
The "5,550 dangerous thugs" bit is David Vitter's interpretation of mostly bipartisan efforts to reduce America's nonviolent prison population—and specifically, efforts by outgoing Gov. Bobby Jindal and other Louisiana leaders to reform Louisiana's position as America's most prolific jailer of its own citizens by moving nonviolent drug offenders to rehab programs, rather than prisons. You wouldn't know that Vitter's attacking a Bobby Jindal program aimed at nonviolent offenders from the scary, black-and-white ad featuring cuts between prisoners, drug use, frightened white ladies, and scary black people, but then that's not exactly Vitter's point, is it?
"This kind of stuff can really have a big backlash, but it takes a while for this stuff to take shape," [University of Louisiana-Lafayette political science professor Pearson Cross] said. "If you put this out in the last 24 hours (of a race), it can really hit people with a visceral impact. But if you put it out early, people can sit back and digest it and see it for what it really is."
Asked what he thinks the ad is trying to achieve, Cross said, "It's an ad to scare white people with black people.
Indeed, the ad may have been
released into the wild early. The campaign itself isn't promoting it yet, though Politico was able to
obtain a copy. You're not supposed to release these things early enough for political professors to lambaste your crookedness and dog-whistle racism.
So David Vitter continues to be the stand-up, straight-arrow guy everyone presumed he was after he got caught with his name in the client records of the District of Columbia's most famous madame. During his last Senate race he cut an ad featuring Hispanic-looking people filing through a hole in a chain-link fence in order to receive a giant novelty check made out to "All Illegal Aliens" so just in case you're wondering, this is indeed politics as usual for the man forever to be known as "Diaper Dave."