The racist eye doctor debates

I missed this Philadelphia Inquirer account of the GOP primary debate for the 13th Congressional District race.

One of the candidates in this debate is Melissa Brown, an opthalmologist from Flourtown, Pa., whose losing bid for the 13th seat in 2002 is often delicately referred to as "controversial."

All three candidates for the Republican nomination favor reforming and curtailing the Section 8 program that provides low-income families with housing assistance.

Yet, despite this broad agreement, the debate on this issue was more heated than on any of the topics on which the candidates disagreed. This is particularly extraordinary when you consider that those topics include hot-button issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. So why was the Section 8 program the subject of such contention? Why did the Inky see fit to headline this article "Sparks fly over housing in congressional debate"?

Reporter Chris Gray provides only hints:

The generally civil conversation took a nastier turn when the federal Section 8 rent-subsidy program came up. Brown, whose opposition to the program in Northeast Philadelphia won her both votes and criticism in the 2002 election against incumbent Joseph Hoeffel, said that it was mismanaged and should be dumped.

"We need to put a moratorium on any kind of increase or expansion until the abuses are changed," she said.

Taubenberger said that Section 8 housing had "done more harm to Northeast Philadelphia than any program" he knew.

When her turn came, however, Bard attacked Brown's handling of the issue instead of the program itself. "The history of the last campaign makes another Melissa Brown candidacy a train wreck for the Republicans in November," she said.

Brown, who had received 47.3 percent of the vote against Hoeffel, held back until the next question. Then she defended her actions, saying that her aggressive stance on Section 8 took her opposition by surprise and that many people co-opted her ideas later.

"Guess what? As a leader we get to be called things," she said. "I was called every name in the book. I will not back away from Ellen Bard. I will not back away from Section 8."

What does Ellen Bard, a Republican state legislator, mean by "the history of the last campaign"? And why does Brown's stance on Section 8 result in her getting "called every name in the book" when nobody seems to be calling Bard or Taubenberger names for their similar stances?

The fact is that Brown ran a scurrilous, divisively race-baiting, segregationist campaign in 2002. I don't know, or care, whether that campaign reflected her personal views about her black neighbors, or if this was simply a cynical electoral strategy based on the racial faultlines and demographics of the newly configured district.

If she had spent the 2002 campaign working on a novel, I would call her the "novelist eye doctor." If she had campaigned from the back of a motorcycle, I would call her the "biker eye doctor." But because she spent that campaign the way she did, I refer to her, descriptively, as the racist eye doctor.

I'm not saying that all Republicans are racists (although some could have done more to distance themselves from her fetid '02 campaign). And I'm not saying that anyone who wants to reform the Section 8 program is a racist. I'm saying that anybody, regardless of party affiliation, who runs for office by trying to induce, expand and exploit white voters' fears about black people is a racist.

That's not name-calling, merely naming.