The lastest Mason-Dixon poll puts the race at a dead heat, 43-43.

Can’t be good news for an incumbent senator to be at 43 in late September — and falling.

The Mason-Dixon poll was conducted over the span of the latest Allen n-word allegations, Sunday through Wednesday. I haven’t seen a breakdown yet, but I’d guess Allen was strong the first two days, then faltered on Tuesday and Wednesday.

As for the substances of the charges against Allen to be honest, I could care less if Allen used racial epithets in the 1970s. Society has changed a great deal in 30 years. And three decades is certainly plenty of time for personal growth (of course, if the stuff about him stuffing a day head in a black man’s mailbox is true, well, that would be a little more difficult to look over, no matter how long ago it happened).

What’s troublesome is that Allen’s uncomfortable views on race, the confederacy, and black people continued well into the 1980s with the lynching noose, and into the 1990s with his pandering to the Council of Conservative Citizens. Standing alone, the “macaca” weirdness wouldn’t have revealed much other than that the ugy has a ugly mean streak. In the context of Allen’s history, though, the racial component seems a little more relevant. The other problem of course is that Allen seems to have a hard time telling the truth about all of this.

Couple that with Allen’s knee-jerk support for just about everything President Bush does, his status as a favored son among the cultural right, and his decidedly unlibertarian views on just about every issue except for President Bush’s modest tax cuts, and well, let’s just say I hope his freefall continues.

Webb’s populism troubles me. I could do without the Wal-Mart hate, the union cheerleading, and the outsourcing jive. But he’s good on the “leave me alone” issues, which if he were elected would put him in an extremely exclusive caucus on Capitol Hill.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 7:33 pm 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.