And The Bunny Ain't Even Cute

Some people think the ad is racist. Some think it is funny. More than anything, I think it is just plain cheesy.

With their majority in the Senate potentially hanging in the balance, Republicans were bickering among themselves over an advertisement in the particularly nasty campaign in Tennessee that even some Republicans have denounced as racist.

The dispute pitted former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, the GOP candidate for the seat held by Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, against his own party leadership Tuesday after it rebuffed his call to pull the ad, which lampoons Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s reputation as a man about town.

In the ad, a young white actress playing the stereotype of a “dumb blonde” talks about meeting Ford, a 36-year-old bachelor who is black, “at the Playboy party.” At the end of the ad, she winks and says to the camera, “Harold — call me.”

The ad brought immediate criticism from the Ford campaign and the NAACP, whose Washington office called it “a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.”

I also think it was specifically designed to create racial imagery that will appeal to the lowest common denominator. Harold Ford's double high yella looks probably don't exactly have the same impact though. You'd need a much bigger, blacker "buck" for that. Besides, that "Playboy Bunny" is straight up ugly! She doesn't have "the look."

Watch the video.