Last Friday, I wrote about the battle over school choice in Wisconsin.
Bill Christofferson of The Xoff Files flipped out over a segment that WTMJ radio talk show host Charlie Sykes put together with Mikel Holt, Jim Gilles, and students from Messmer High School in Milwaukee.
Read the script here.
Christofferson claimed that it was illegal for Sykes to air the spot on his show. Of course, it was a ridiculous argument. He obviously was grabbing at straws, in typical lib fashion, to come up with something to get the very powerful segment off the air.
In the meantime, the spot began airing as a paid ad on a number of radio stations. (Xoff failed in his crusade to keep the spot from being heard.)
This was not the end of the controversy. The school choice opponents came up with another plan of attack, one that usually has some success. They charged racism.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
A group of African-American leaders in Milwaukee lambasted a radio advertisement Wednesday that compares Gov. Jim Doyle to two Southern governors, Orval Faubus and George Wallace, who became notorious for trying to block school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.
One of the authors of the ad said it has been replaced with a different version that doesn't directly mention Faubus and Wallace.
...At a news conference held Wednesday at the headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, [NAACP branch President Jerry] Hamilton said linking Doyle with Faubus and Wallace was an "awful comparison."
"The country has lived through segregated times," she said, adding that "Governor Doyle is no segregationist."
"I do not blame the students who appear in the ads," Hamilton said. "They are pawns used by cowardly people who prey upon the fears of parents."
[Mikel] Holt said he thought the ads were misunderstood.
We "never called Doyle a racist," he said. "All they said was that if he doesn't lift the cap, they will be thrown out of the program and it will have the chilling effect of his standing in the schoolhouse door. There was no maliciousness involved."
Holt added that the students "are being held hostage in this political gamesmanship."
I agree with Holt. The focus should be on the students, not the orchestrated posturing of politicians and organizations on a damage control mission.
The NAACP and others were smart to stage a news conference publicizing their outrage over what they claim was an attempt to characterize Doyle as a racist, a segregationist Dem from days of old. It deflected attention away from the real issue. Instead of talking about lifting the cap, they shifted the discussion to the victimization of poor Governor Doyle.
Certainly, it's legitimate for Doyle's supporters to point out that he is not a racist, even though the spot in its original form never claimed that he is.
What bothers me is that these African-American leaders aren't fighting for the students. Why don't they back the kids that want a chance to receive the best education available? Why not hold a news conference to draw attention to the needs of the students?
The fact is Doyle is blocking students' access to schools by not lifting the cap. In that sense, he is standing in the schoolhouse door as surely as Orval Faubus and George Wallace did.
That's not to say that I believe Doyle is racially motivated in his attempts to keep children from choosing their schools. I don't. I absolutely do not think he's intentionally trying to prevent minorities and the poor from having the same opportunities as more economically fortunate kids out of any personal racist agenda.
That may be why I never considered the ad to be an attack on Doyle's character. I don't see it as implying that he's a racist. In fact, I think it's unfair of the NAACP and the others to charge that Sykes and Holt are exploiting race in their ad.
If it's wrong to unfairly call Doyle a racist, how can it be right to unfairly say that the ad, and therefore its creators, are racist?
What the original ad does is highlight the fact that some children are not being allowed access to schools they'd like to attend. Doyle is standing in their way.
That doesn't mean that he's racist.
It means that he needs to lift the cap.
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