31 May 2007

The Politics of Suspicion

... George Smather's 1950 Senate nomination campaign against incumbent Democrat Claude Pepper, in which Smathers successfully exploited Pepper's reputation as a doctrinaire New Dealer and forceful advocate of the welfare state, which opened him to attacks as a Soviet sympathizer and "Stalin's mouthpiece in the Senate," or "Red" Pepper as unscrupulous opponents called him. Whimsically taking advantage of the climate of suspicion and the extraordinary ignorance of his audience, Smathers shamelessly described Pepper in a speech as an "extrovert," who practiced "nepotism" with his sister-in-law and "celibacy" before his marriage, and had a sister who was a Greenwich Village "thespian."

From pp. 160-1, Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, Little Brown & Company, 2003.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here in East Texas, a local radio DJ was forced to apologize in the early 80s for referring to Ronald Reagan as a "homo sapien."

Chrlane said...

You're missing some pronouns in there today.

Anonymous said...

I'll help you out, Ron.

he, she, we, they, them, us, her, him