Sleaze Returns

Republican attack misfires.

New embarrassment for Randy Sparacino.

Fox News and Republicans attack Jeff Golden, saying he "repeatedly used N-word in book." 

I had intended to move on and leave Randy Sparacino alone. His campaign is a million-dollar blast of advertisements. He is the Republican candidate for State Senate running against Jeff Golden. He is one of the Southern Oregon Republicans whose campaign strategy is lying low. No debates, no joint appearances.  Sparacino doesn't want to say what he would do about banning abortions or awarding Oregon's electoral vote. His campaign strategy is to let the state and national GOP run ads for him that make him a familiar face. Mr. Nice Guy.

Sparacino's plan just got sabotaged. Fox News and the Republican State Leadership Committee tried out a hit piece with an indignant accusation that Golden used the N-word in a memoir he wrote as a young man. The Fox/GOP attack implies that Golden was racist, or insensitive to Blacks, or used the word himself. The Fox story included some hyperventilated pretense of shock. Despicable!!! Shameful!!! The Fox story said:

Jeff Golden's words are despicable and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms," Republican State Leadership Committee spokesman Zach Kraft said in statement. "Jeff Golden owes voters a serious apology and every Democrat candidate for state Senate should condemn Jeff Golden's shameful behavior."

The whole attack has fundamental flaws that even the attack itself could not obscure. Golden was a 20-year-old working on a civil rights project in Georgia, living with a Black share-cropping family. As early as the second sentence of the article readers were confronted with the massive improbability that Golden was the insensitive racist that justified the "despicable" and "shameful" complaint:  

State Senator Jeff Golden, a progressive Democrat, published "Watermelon Summer" in 1971 about his experience spending a summer on a Georgia sharecropper farm.

That's right. Golden was a young racial-justice activist working at a civil rights project, doing farm work, living with a Black sharecropper family. Say, what? He's the racist here? That doesn't sound right. And, of course, it isn't right.

The Fox/GOP article listed the half-dozen occasions when the N-word was spelled out in the book. It was obvious from the context that Golden was quoting the words and thoughts of the people in opposition to the racial justice goals of his work.

The whole piece was a misfire. It was invented outrage and intentional mischaracterization. It is dishonest and it looks dishonest on its face. The real victim here is Sparacino. This breaks the illusion that he is not part of a state and national Republican agenda. It soils him by making clear that this effort will include whatever malicious device they can find, including faux outrage over a point they argue dishonestly. 

That is now part of the Sparacino image. This turns him from Mr. Nice Guy into a presumed beneficiary of a Republican attack machine that will happily make false arguments if it serves their purpose. He is letting his funders create the Sparacino image, which now includes this ridiculous, obviously-false attack. Either he is a weak pawn of upstate Republicans, or he isn't such a nice guy after all.

The incident gives Golden an opportunity to tell his story, which I print below verbatim. Jeff Golden and I were both at Harvard at the same time. We never met there. Curiously, we were both growing melons that summer. He was doing it on behalf of racial justice. I kept every penny for myself, hoping to earn enough to pay my tuition. I voted for Sparacino for Medford mayor, but expect to vote for Golden for State Senator. I am disappointed that Sparacino is an enabler of Trump's election claims. It worries me what he might do in Salem if the presidential election is close. I am also uncomfortable that he will not come clean on his position on abortion. Republicans are under intense pressure to ban it completely if they have a majority.

Statement by Jeff Golden

THOUGHTS ON RECENT CHARGES OF RACISM

I’ve been asked to comment on the charge that the journal I wrote in the summer of 1970 was racist.

First a little about the book in question. Watermelon Summer (Lippincott & Company, 1971) is a journal I kept when I lived with an African-American sharecropping family while working on a civil rights project in Lee County, Georgia in 1970.  It was an early chapter in a lifetime of political activism centered partly on advancing social and racial justice in America. The N-word, fully spelled out, appears in those passages of the book where I described and ridiculed the language of hostile, bigoted people we encountered (we also met delightful, hospitable Georgians that summer). 

Books of that era often contained the spelled-out word to describe the language of racism. I’ve long since learned how much pain that word has caused, and still does, and that using it is harmful in any context. While none of the dozens of readers who’ve contacted me over the years ever suggested that Watermelon Summer is remotely racist, I can understand how people reading the isolated sentences circulating this week could be deeply offended by reading this truly ugly word. I am sorry for that.

Beyond suggesting that interested people read the book to make their own judgments, that’s about all there is to say. Going further would give life to a desperate campaign ploy we’ve seen two times before, in 1989 and 2018. In both cases, sentences from the book were ripped out of context and publicized in the last weeks of faltering campaigns to pull voters’ attention away from meaningful issues and the positions that my opponents and I had on them. 

This week’s Fox story about my book, and the outraged online postings that followed, have no genuine concern about racism’s damage to people and communities. They are 100% about distracting voters in the campaign’s final weeks from issues like homelessness, full access to healthcare and education, reproductive and other privacy rights, coping with the cost of living, the stranglehold of Big Money on politics, protection from catastrophic fire—there’s a long list. This week’s attack, pushed desperately across the Internet, says “Don’t look at all that! Look over here at this word that Golden wrote down multiple times 52 years ago in his journal! And don’t look at what he’s actually done in a very public life ever since. Don’t look at his record and ideas, or his opponent’s… look at this word!”

This tactic is deeply cynical. I don’t plan to fuel it with more comment.

 

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