Please don't throw me in dat Briar Patch
Update from the comments below regarding Romney's "tar baby" statement at the Ames event this weekend.. Romney apologizes for the comment and is ripped for it in Boston... No mention about his comment regarding Asians as "hard workers" which is only significant given the racial tone of the coverage.
As we said it the comments below. This is a nice opportunity for Mitt to work out the kinks, one of the advantages of starting a run so early.
You do have to appreciate the irony that Romney's use of the term "tar baby" got him into a "tar baby of his own"
Update: Boston Herald points out the differences between Mitt's unintentional remarks and Mel's blatant racism here
posted by Caucus Cooler at 7/31/2006
13 Comments:
Hey guys, I've got the audio up on my blog.
http://www.realworldpolitico.com/index.cfm/2006/7/31/A-sticky-situation
The thing that shocks us is that he said it twice. You would think that after he said tar baby in ames, he would be advised to use a different term in cr. You would think.
hmmmm... Dems and GOP prez pac staffers trying to make an issue of the term tar-baby, the dumbest thing since Greedo, shooting first it is....
what shocks me is that it took the Boston Globe only four tries to find an African-American "leader" who was offended.
The Globe sucks. The good news: the more they attack Mitt, the more it will help him in Iowa and elsewhere.
He did not say it twice . . . I was at both events, and it was not part of his stump speech. It was part of an answer to a question that I asked him. I'm glad he said it. It exposes the liberal "race baiter" for who they really are and helps out his name recognition a bit (which still suffers among the US populous in general).
glad he said it? Jeff you've got to admit that's a bit of a stretch... we agree it's not that big a deal, but "glad he said it" that's just silly.
Admittedly, I pressed "submit" too quickly on that one. It was rash and I didn't mean it that it was a "good move".
I do think it illustrates to conservatives how silly the liberal left is and doesn't really hurt Romney politically in any significant way.
That we'll buy.
Just an update:
The Boston Herald has offered a "sort of" apology to Romney in the following peice:
http://news.bostonherald.com/columnists/view.bg?articleid=150888&format=text
"Mitt unduly tarred with Mel’s brush"
By Virginia Buckingham
Boston Herald Columnist
Tuesday, August 1, 2006 - Updated: 09:08 AM EST
It’s a coincidence that Gov. Mitt Romney is taking heat for what some see as a racial slur in the same news cycle as Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant.
But it would be a real shame if there was no distinction made by the guardians against discrimination between Romney’s common reference and Gibson’s disgusting tirade.
All slurs are not created equal.
Romney quickly apologized for his use of the term “tar baby” to describe his involvement in the Big Dig political mess. If unintentional bigotry loves company, Romney has plenty of it including Sen. John Kerry, The Boston Globe editorial board, the Boston Herald editorial board, White House press secretary Tony Snow and WBUR’s “On Point” host Tom Ashbrook.
In a June 2003 Boston Globe profile, Kerry described his leadership of a congressional committee on missing soldiers in Southeast Asia as a potential “tar baby.”
In a 1994 editorial, the Globe described U.S. dealings with Iran as resembling a “tar baby” and even articulated the term’s assumed meaning in a 1998 editorial on China’s censoring of the Internet: “The Communist rulers of Beijing ended last year tangling with a tar baby. The tar baby - passive, sticky and invincible - was played by the Internet, which the leaders want to censor.”
The Herald weighed in on Romney’s Turnpike merger proposal in a 2004 editorial noting “What lawmaker wouldn’t want to pass this tar baby to the guy who may be running for re-election in 2006?”
More recently, in May, the White House’s Snow colorfully refused to comment on a government surveillance program saying that doing so would “hug the tar baby.”
And Ashbrook, as well as Romney apparently, missed the resulting brouhaha since the WBUR host also used the term in a June 16 broadcast to describe the Guantanamo prison issue.
I personally have used the term tar baby, at least in conversation, if not in writing (though I’ve done that, too) plenty of times in my 19-plus year career.
And I confess not only did I not know of its racial implications, I also didn’t know of its origination as a literary trap for Br’er Rabbit. The Boston Globe’s language expert, Jan Freeman, filled me in on that in a June column.
Ignorance isn’t an excuse, it is only an explanation. I assume most, if not all, of those who were offended by Romney will accept his explanation and apology and, more, understand his comment in the spirit in which he offered it.
Jeff-
Thanks for alerting us to this article. We missed it. We'll add it to the post as an update. In the future though, we'd appreciate it if you just posted the link and a quote instead of the entire article text.
Thanks
CC
Sorry. I'll try to refrain from long pasting in of articles in my future comments.
P.S. It was actually the Boston Herald (not Globe) that had that piece. Just thoughy you'd like to change that in the updated post.
Whoops. Damn that Cooler intern.
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