Kentucky GOP: New Yorkers Are Icky
Via Chris Bowers, a pretty telling ad on behalf of Mitch McConnell:
I would say this is anti-semitic, except at key junctures they’re tapping into anti-Italian sentiments, implying that because Chuck Schumer is Italian, he must be one of those gangsters you’ve seen on The Sopranos. But of course Schumer isn’t Italian, he’s Jewish. It’s all just a single heady brew of New Yorky ethnicness.
UPDATE: A couple of additional points. One is that this is a terrible New York accent. Surely they could have found someone who’d do it right. Another is that in addition to conflating Jews and Italians, this ad seems to be positing the idea that outer borough white ethnics love hippies. Someone needs to send some All in the Family DVDs to Kentucky, I think.
46 Responses to “Kentucky GOP: New Yorkers Are Icky”
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October 10th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
The ad is persuasive. I no longer think that New York Senator Chuck Schumer should also be a Senator from Kentucky. It would set a bad precedent. It should definitely go to someone from Kentucky.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Maybe your former colleague Megan can gt well soon so she can lecture us East Coast folk about how biased we are about the middle of the country.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
“The ad is persuasive. I no longer think that New York Senator Chuck Schumer should also be a Senator from Kentucky. It would set a bad precedent. It should definitely go to someone from Kentucky.”
I agree. I think the current four Senate seats that Schumer holds are plenty. There is no need for him to occupy a fifth seat in Kentucky.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Why did the ad refer to him as Charles instead of Chuck? To make him seem like more of a fancypants?
October 10th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
You know, now that we have campaign crowds calling for the murder of the opposing presidential candidate, the “Betray Us” controversy is starting to seem awfully quaint.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Will this work? I loved how they put Baltimore-SanFrancico-Italian-Pelosi in there. Funny how Palin is uberMom but not so much for SanFranNan.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
If the Chuckster can actually get to 60, I think we ought to build gigantic golden statues of him throughout the country running a sword through Mitch McConnell.
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And I’m starting to believe we’ll get over 260 in the House.
No one seems to have noticed, but assuming the shape of the ‘08 election holds firm, the ‘06 and ‘08 elections will be the best back-to-back Congressional performance for any party since the 1930 to 1936 period.
But mum’s the word. No need to alert anyone before the election and allow the GOP to run against ‘unified Democratic control’, not that it would help them all that much…
October 10th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
There are so many confused stereotypes in there that I am much more amused than offended (as a NY italian i mean). Schumer is apparently a jewish italian mobster who loves hippies and illegal aliens? Now that’s unique!
I am a little offended by that awful version of the dying NY accent however.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Mr. Bergstrom (Dustin Hoffman): How do you know I’m Jewish?
Lisa Simpson: Either that or Italian.
Mr. Bergstrom: I’m Jewish.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
I’m glad they hate us again. After 9/11 they loved us and it was kind of creepy, in the way that Evangelicals make Jews feel creepy…come to think of it, we’re talking the same groups of people here.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I would say this is anti-semitic
You mean the shot of Schumer grinning in front of the spinning dollar signs and “Big Buck$” didn’t sell you?
except at key junctures they’re tapping into anti-Italian sentiments
Here’s another Simpsons quote for you: It can be two things!
October 10th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Just another case of red state cultural elites misunderestimating and mocking the good, hard-working Americans in coastal fly-towards country.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
He “attacked” a general?! What did he do? Sick a bunch of octogenarian nuns on him?
October 10th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
It’s a typical McConnell campaign ad. They’d been absent until now when the Democratic challenger had crept into a tie in the polls. It was only a matter of time until McConnell opened his wallet and his bile. But I repeat myself. There are nasty political ads and then there’s McConnell ads.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
You can be both, though Schumer doesn’t look it. All of the Italian Jews I’ve known were blonde.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
“It’s a typical McConnell campaign ad. They’d been absent until now when the Democratic challenger had crept into a tie in the polls. It was only a matter of time until McConnell opened his wallet and his bile. But I repeat myself. There are nasty political ads and then there’s McConnell ads.”
Winning Kentucky would be the sweetest seat to take.
All of the Southern seats would be delicious to win. Taking down Dole in NC is looking probable. Beating Chambliss would be sweet revenge for Max Cleland. And beating Cornyn in Texas would have nice symbolic value in the President’s home state.
But beating McConnell would trump them all. It’s not just that he’s a sleazebag, it’s that taking down the GOP leader would cause confusion in their ranks in January, and allow for the House to blitz them with bills in Obama’s first 100 days.
The election day trifecta is for McCain to lose WV, McConnell to lose in the Senate, and Shadegg to lose in the House. Do that, and as they say in the financial markets, we’ll be approaching capitulation…
October 10th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
MARY
That New York sense of humor was just a…
CALDWELL
Mary, there’s no need…
MARY
Reverend, please! They think they’re so much smarter. They think it’s smart talk.
But nobody else does.
JOSH
I’m actually from Connecticut, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, Mary…
TOBY
She meant Jewish. [A stunned silence. Everyone stares at Toby.] When she said “New
York sense of humor”, she was talking about you and me.
JOSH
You know what, Toby, let’s just not even go there.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
All of the Italian Jews I’ve known were blonde.
Mmm. Dominique Sanda in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.
Very lovely.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Gotta love the part attacking the “Hippie Museum.” Go back to Russia, Schumer! And take your damn rock ‘n’ roll music with you!
October 10th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
It must make these assholes crazy that their beloved 9/11 happened in depraved New York City instead of a decent small town with Values and whatnot.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Wow, that really was a horrible NY accent. I can’t imagine this working on anyone really, it is such a poor ad.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Are people familiar with the infamous appearance of Norman Mailer on the Dick Cavett Show? Where Cavett asked Mailer if he’d like another chair for his ego? Four seats seems about right for Chuck.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Living just across the river in Cincinnati I haven’t seen this yet but I am dreading to have to endure this stupidity for the next several weeks.
Personally I don’t think it’s meant to appeal to anti semitic or anti Italian feelings, although I can see why folks would think so. But in my experience the bigotry I’ve seen here is simply anti-black with anti-immigrant fast catching up.
I think the big scary thing is meant to be New York City itself. for some in these parts that’s practically a curse word right there. Some folks are giving KY bigots too much credit when looking for other reasons
October 10th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Remember the wisdom of Tony Soprano – “Italians?” “Jews with better food.”
October 10th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
“Are people familiar with the infamous appearance of Norman Mailer on the Dick Cavett Show? Where Cavett asked Mailer if he’d like another chair for his ego? Four seats seems about right for Chuck.”
Mailer deserved eight Senate seats.
There is an amazing collection of Mailer’s letters in last week’s New Yorker. The political stuff is all really good, but the stuff about Kennedy in 1960 is the best.
Mailer foresaw the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis coming quite clearly, and had better political instincts about it than JFK.
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And as far as the Chuckster goes, he deserves any ego he wants. The man is very, very good.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
There were a fair number of Jewish mobsters. Fact.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Lay off McConnell….
Corpse-Americans deserve to have one representative in congress.
October 10th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Maybe the museum would be acceptable if it had dioramas showing the hippies dropping acid with dinosaurs.
October 10th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Kentucky has given the world Hunter Thompson, Muhammad Ali, and Slint. Shouldn’t KY conservatives be frightened of what’s inside their own borders?
October 10th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Kind of ironic given that his wife, Elaine Chao, went to high school in Syosset.
October 10th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Thank you John Doe; that’s what I came in here to post. I’ll add a link to youtube for those who haven’t seen it.
October 10th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
To paraphrase the Sopranos – “Italians? Just jews with better food.”
October 10th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Mozza-Pizza
October 10th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I got an anti-Jeanne-Shaheen on economic issues mailer here in Concord, New Hampshire that appeared to me to be attempting to make me think Democrats=Jews=untrustworthy. Jeanne Shaheen was a pretty well-liked governor who couldn’t manage to overcome the lingering NH Republican bias and win a Senate seat back before Republicans took apart their party and we elected Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter. She’s been out of office for a while, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to blame her for the economic crisis. She has never been in the House or the Senate, so I’m not sure how the pamphlet-writers associated her with Chuck Schumer, but the message was that she pals around with Liberal New York Liberals like (Jew) Chuck Schumer.
I showed it to my girlfriend and she didn’t see the Jewish implication until I showed her the Greenspan picture inside, which again was only tangentially related to the issues at hand and was, rather perversely, used to illustrate praise of Greenspan’s economic policy and foresight. So the literal message was “Jeanne Shaheen and Chuck Schumer ruined our economy by not listening to Greenspan”, but I think the subtext was “You should associate Jeanne Shaheen with Jewish financiers who want to ruin your economy for personal gain”. I should have written them back with advice to include George Soros next time.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Terry Gross did an interview with Maurice Sendak (which I unfortunately can’t find) not long ago in which he talked about growing up in the Bronx (or Brooklyn, I forget) in a weirdly mixed community of Jews and Italians. Young Sendak didn’t know about such distinctions, so he just thought that the Italians were happy Jews.
When I was young, the child of some pretty country people from rural parts of Texas (but my father had made a military career, and he believed very much in the Truman integrated armed forces, with no concern to be shown about the ethnicity or religion of fellow service members, a view utterly unlike what he had learned growing up on a very hard scrabble farm in Depression-era East Texas), I got my first exposure to Jewish comedy on the Ed Sullivan show, between Beatle appearances. But to me, it was just “New York Humor” — what did I know from Jews?
October 10th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
I think it’s kind of funny. Yglesias needs a sense of humor.
October 11th, 2008 at 2:45 am
Matthew in #32 beat me to it.
The ad is kind of funny. All that said, you could make an equally funny ad about Kentucky that would be condemned in very serious tones by media elites who pretend to speak for rural rubes.
The ad’s tacky, too, which is why it probably won’t help McConnell much. And the list of “radical” groups shown on the screen have laughably non-threatening names. “Keeping America’s Promise”!! The horror.
I’d like to see some figures about how much money and time has been spent raising awareness about the pocket-lint million dollar earmark for the Woodstock museum.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:09 am
The ad also suggests that Tony Soprano was a New Yorker. Bright, they’re not.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:47 am
too bad chuck schumer isn’t actually running to be the senator of kentucky or this ad might have actually made sense.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:20 am
As Tony Soprano said: “Italians–Jews with better food.”
October 11th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Who made this ad? It looks like something a 12-year old put together on his Mac. Seriously, it looks that amateurish.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Of course they could find someone with a good New York accent. The trouble is that in that case, he would be either an actor or an actual New Yorker–and in either case, it would be hard to distinguish the rhetoric through the bag over his head.
October 12th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Having witnessed “the typical McConnell attack ad” I’m not quite so sure this is what we’re watching. It’s got the levity, but it seemed a little shoddy to me, like it was put together pretty hastily. Not to mention that I think it missed the target — there wasn’t a single image of Lunsford and Schumer embracing, shaking hands, in the same room. It’s too open to response. I think McConnell’s campaign is more worried than they’d like to let on, watching that.
Is this actually running on TV, or is it just a web ad?
March 15th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
The food is probably the best feature.
March 27th, 2009 at 12:57 am
How to add myspace mobster fast?
March 27th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
How to add myspace mobster fast?