Sex Scandals, “Responsible Fatherhood” and the 2008 Election Campaign: When “Sex Talk” Trumps Race and Class

It may appear that President Obama escaped the 2008 campaign relatively unharmed. But this is not entirely true: as an African-American male, he was subjected to an extraordinary degree of moral scrutiny. The Obama marriage and Michelle Obama, in particular, were subjected to merciless scrutiny and disparaging attacks.

In response, we could ask, first, the “Gary Hart question.”¹ If an emerging leader like Obama must be safely ensconced within a monogamous heterosexual marriage with a properly subordinated loyal spouse in order to be taken seriously on the public stage, then how many highly talented and worthy individuals will be unjustly disqualified from running for office? And how do race and gender intensify this sort of exclusionary moral “vetting”? Why does the Obama marriage have to pass a much more demanding test than the McCain marriage? So what if the Obamas fist bumped²; can you imagine if they kissed on stage like the Gores³ did in 2000? How many mediocre white males are going to pass the political leadership test by default, for the reason that simply having dark skin, or simply bearing a non-Anglo-Saxon name, or simply being female⁴ is to be already morally suspect?

Second, we need to remember the subtle ways in which race, gender, and sexuality work together outside the terrain of an explicit scandal itself. As Donna Brazile⁵ rightly pointed out, the McCain campaign certainly chose carefully when it launched its ad that attacked Sen. Obama as a mere celebrity. The ad placed the images of this middle-aged black family man next to two white young single women known for their unsavory conduct (Paris Hilton and Britney Spears).⁶ If the point was simply to brand Obama as a young upstart lacking intellectual depth and experience, why not compare him to Denzel Washington or Bono?

In fact, President Obama is forced to work in a political environment deeply poisoned by sexualized racist hatred. In 2006, Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN), an African-American Democrat with a centrist voting record and a strong foothold in his state and within the Party elite, campaigned for the Tennessee Senate seat that came open after the Republican Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, announced his retirement. Ford had been re-elected four times and had garnered, on average, 80 percent of the votes cast in his district. During the 2006 Senate campaign, the opinion polls suggested that Ford was doing so well in contesting this Republican seat that the race had become too close to call. However, the Republican National Committee ran an attack ad against Ford. Working on an extremely slender factual basis, the ad features a male character who claims that Ford took funds from the producers of pornography; in reality, Ford, who had cast several votes in opposition to gay rights and abortion, had joined 3,000 other guests at a massive football party in 2005 sponsored by Playboy, the mildly pornographic men’s magazine. More important, the ad also features a clip with a heavily made-up young woman with blonde hair and a low-cut dress. She poses in a sexually provocative manner, declares with evident pleasure that she met Ford at a Playboy party, and then beckons directly to Ford, “Harold, call me.”⁷ Ford’s Republican opponent, Bob Corker, described the ad as “distasteful” and claimed that he asked the Republican National Committee to take it off the air. The highly respected civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), denounced the ad. William Cohen, a former Secretary of Defense and Senator (R-MA) from the Republican Party, described the ad as a “very serious appeal to a racist sentiment.”⁸ The smear tactic of linking an attractive black family man to a young blonde woman remobilizes the old racist beliefs about black men’s voracious sexual appetite and their predatory interest in sexually assaulting white women.

Corker edged out Ford by three percent in the November 2006 election. Although many whites did vote for Ford, they did not do so in large enough proportions, and the state of Tennessee has a majority white electorate. It is not clear that it was the attack ad itself that made the difference; the rumors about Ford’s financial dealings were also featured in the post-election commentary.⁹ However, the notorious campaign ad was widely circulated, not only across Tennessee but also throughout the entire country.

It is not only black candidates who become the targets of racialized sexual smear tactics in presidential campaigns. Any Democrat who is successfully typecast as excessively “liberal” is in danger of being associated with rapacious black masculinity. During the 1988 election season, Governor Michael Dukakis from Massachusetts was the Democrats’ Presidential nominee. Dukakis, a white man of Greek-American descent, was subjected to an attack ad in which he was blamed for the conduct of William Horton.¹⁰ (The ad was produced by a political action committee associated with the Republican Party.) Dubbed “Willie” by the ad, Horton had been serving his custodial sentence in the state penitentiary for murder. With Dukakis’s permission, Horton was released on furlough—and ended up committing rape and assault during his temporary release. Already tagged as a liberal northeasterner by the Republicans, Dukakis was relentlessly linked to Horton’s crimes. The Republican candidate, George H.W. Bush, denounced Dukakis as a “card carrying member of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union),” and highlighted Dukakis’s opposition to capital punishment. For the many white voters still influenced by the nation’s deeply engrained sexual-racial script, the implications were devastating: a Dukakis administration would be much too permissive on crime. It would take its orders from the radical wing of the civil rights movement, and it would usher in the much feared return to the excessive racial egalitarianism of the 1960s. The return of black power would mean the emasculation of the white man and the endangerment of white women. Dukakis lost to Bush in a landslide.

1. Former Senator Gary Hart (D-CO) was considered a leading contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the 1988 election season. He left the race, however, after it was revealed that he had been having an extra-marital affair with a younger woman. [↩]
2. On June 3, 2008, just before Sen. Obama took the podium to acknowledge Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) withdrawal from the Democratic nomination race and to accept the Democratic presidential nomination on an unofficial basis, his wife Michelle wished him well by awkwardly using this ubiquitous “hip-hop” ritual. In a country still steeped in Islamaphobia, Obama had to endure a whisper campaign about his alleged Muslim faith. His wife, Michelle Obama, was portrayed as an unpatriotic militant, and the couple’s stilted handshake was depicted in alarmist tones as a “terrorist fist jab.” These caricatures were reproduced in an ostensibly satirical drawing on the cover of The New Yorker (21 July 2008). [↩]
3. Al Gore, a former Senator (D-TN) and Vice President in the Bill Clinton Administrations (1994-2000), was the Democratic presidential contender in the 2000 election. Dogged by criticism that he was too intellectual, unfeeling, and insufficiently “manly,” Gore embraced his wife Tipper on stage at the 2000 Democratic Convention and held her in a full-mouth kiss for three seconds.  [↩]
4. On the misogynist treatment of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, see Katha Pollitt, “Iron My Skirt,” The Nation, 5 June 2008, posted at www.thenation.com. [↩]
5. Brazile, an African-American woman, currently appears regularly in the mainstream media as a commentator. In the 2000 election, she was a senior campaign aide to Sen. Al Gore. [↩]
6. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c0vctCfhH8&feature=related. The television ad for the McCain campaign also places the word “foreign” in large font next to Sen. Obama’s face in a shot that is ostensibly concerned with America’s dependence upon oil imports. [↩]
7. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWkrwENN5CQ. [↩]
8. Max Blumenthal, “Character Assassin,” The Nation, 30 October 2006. [↩]
9. Adam Nossiter, “Is the South Truly a Dead Zone for Democrats?”, The New York Times, 21 November 2006. [↩]
10. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9j6Wfdq3o&feature=related. [↩]