Joe Gandelman smears James Webb, a candidate for the U.S. Senate who’s running in the Democratic primary on Tuesday. Gandelman picks up on accusations from Webb’s opponent Harris Miller that a flier distributed by Webb’s campaign is anti-semitic.

Let’s a few caveats out of the way: I like Webb. Of the three men running (Webb, Miller, and Republican incumbent George Allen), he seems to me to be the least despicable. That said, the flier is amateurish demagoguery. And outsourcing is obviously an issue where Webb and I don’t see eye to eye.

But bigoted? Gandelman (quoting from Forbes) and Miller say the ad depicts Miller with a “grotescquely” hooked nose. I don’t know. Here’s the ad. Here’s a profile of Miller. Is that exaggerated? If someone does in fact have a large nose, does depicting them with a large nose always indicate anti-semitism?

Gandelman and Miller object that the add shows Miller with money in his pockets, similar, they say, to the way bigoted cartoons of Jews show money falling from their pockets. I guess. I took the money in Miller’s pockets to mean that he’s a greedy businessman who sent jobs overseas (neither of which I really have a problem with, frankly). Again, is the money-in-the-pockets way of depicting greed in an illustration now off-limits, too?

Gandelman and Miller note that the add refers to Miller as the “anti-christ.” Actually, the reference is a quote from an Infoweek article critical of Miller on the outsourcing issue. Here’s the article. There’s nothing anti-semitic about it. Miller was a key lobbyist in Washington who lobbied for tech visas and against attempts to restrict outsourcing. I happen to think he was right on these particular issues. But if you’ve lost your job to outsourcing, calling Miller the anti-christ of unemployed IT workers isn’t a beyond-the-pale bit of hyperbole (and let’s not forget — the ad was targeted at union workers).

Curiously, Gandelman didn’t run a picture of or a link to the ad in his original post. A link doesn’t pop up until the comments section. Instead, Gandelman’s post does include a couple of disgusting, actually anti-semitic cartoons from Nazi-era Germany, as if those were part of the flier (they weren’t, of course). Frankly, that’s a far worse smear on Webb than Webb’s flier was on Harris. And if Gandelman’s goal was to portray Webb as an anti-semite, running those cartoons only served to show how far from real anti-semitism Webb’s flier actually was.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 10th, 2006 at 7:37 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.