When Will the GOP Tone It Down?

Remember George Allen? Not that George Allen — the football coach. The other George Allen, who was the son of the football coach and was Governor of Virginia from 1994 to 1998 and then Senator from Virginia from 2000 to 2007.

In 2006 he ran for re-election to the Senate and on August 11, 2006, at a campaign stop he referred to a dark-skinned onlooker as ‘macaca,’ which is a racist slur meaning ‘monkey,’ and is often used against non-whites from other countries although in this instance, the guy happened to be born and raised in the United States.

I may be mistaken, but I believe that Allen’s intemperate outburst, which ended the political career of a guy being touted as a possible Presidential contender, was also the first time that the internet carried a home-made video of this kind of embarrassing behavior which then got replayed on network TV.

All of a sudden, what someone said to a small audience in a political campaign could become the stuff of international concern, as Barack Obama discovered when he made his ‘clinging to their religion and guns’ comment in 2008, a lesson Mitt Romney hadn’t learned when he said that 47% of Americans were ‘dependent’ on government handouts in a private speech to donors that was caught on video in 2012.