Politics

George Allen's presidential campaign may just have crashed on takeoff, said John Dickerson in Slate.com. The Republican senator from Virginia, whom many social conservatives see as the best man to succeed George Bush as president, last week was caught indulging in an apparent racist insult. At a campaign rally, Allen called the overwhelmingly white crowd's attention to a young, dark-skinned videographer working for his opponent. 'œLet's give a welcome to Macaca here,' Allen said. 'œWelcome to America and the real world of Virginia.' 'œMacaca,' derived from macaque, a genus of monkey, is a racial slur used in France against foreigners with dark skin. Allen—who has a French Tunisian mother and speaks French fluently—later claimed he didn't know what macaca meant, and had merely ad-libbed a friendly nickname for the young man. The 'œmore believable' explanation, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial, is that Allen, like generations of Republicans before him, was pandering to Southern white voters with a little all-American 'œrace baiting.' Â

The irony here, said Michael Scherer in Salon.com, is that the man Allen insulted is a native-born Virginian of Asian Indian heritage, whereas Allen, the son of legendary NFL coach George Allen, grew up wealthy in California. Since then, however, he's been wearing cowboy boots, chewing tobacco, and wooing the Republican Party's right wing as a 'œdown-home' champion of the 'œ'real America,' the one without homosexuals, movie moguls, or Ivy League professors who want to ban guns and burn flags.' Hey, it worked for George W. Bush, said Mike Allen in The Washington Post. Much of the buzz around Allen is directly inspired by his 'œuncanny' resemblance, politically speaking, to that other child of blue-state privilege who reinvented himself as a red-state cowboy.