“Felix Macacawitz.”
This nickname is presently haunting Virginia Sen. George Allen in his re-election bid, a campaign that has morphed from a battle between Allen and Democratic nominee Jim Webb into a contest pitting Allen’s present against Allen’s past.
Allen’s unraveling began in May, when The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza wrote a cover piece chronicling the senator’s fascination with the Confederacy, one which clearly exceeds that of a history buff. The article showed an old yearbook photo of Allen with a Confederate flag pin on his lapel.
By midsummer, Webb campaign consultant Steve Jarding began calling Allen by his full name: George Felix Allen. Jarding’s ploy reminded voters that the senator who casts himself as an authentic Southerner is, in fact, a privileged kid who grew up as a football coach’s son in Southern California.
“George Felix Allen,” after all, sounds like a name plucked from the registry of the Mayflower four centuries ago, not that of the driver who had the pole position at Martinsville Speedway four weeks ago. The California reminder also made Allen’s Confederate curiosities all the more curious.
Perhaps these criticisms so unnerved Allen, veteran politician, that he lost his cool on Aug. 11 in the small, rural town of Breaks. That’s where Allen, knowing full well that he was being videotaped, twice referred to the Webb staffer taping him — a young man named S.R. Sidarth, a native-born American of Indian descent who was following Allen — as “macaca.”
The word sounds eerily like “macaque,” a monkey species, and doubles as a familiar racist slur in parts of North Africa. That part of the world that might seem irrelevant were Allen’s mother not Tunisian. Allen insists he made the word up, and denies that it was intended as a racial slur aimed at the lone brown face in the otherwise white audience that Allen called “real America.”
Speaking of Allen’s mother, the next bizarre turn in the campaign came earlier this month when Allen revealed that his maternal grandfather was Jewish.
Being Jewish was not the problem. Allen’s comments about the revelation were. At one point, he rather clumsily told reporters that his Jewish background was an “interesting nuance,” but that he “still had a ham sandwich for lunch — and my mother made great pork chops.”
Allen’s self-destruction continued this week when Salon reported claims by three former friends or college football teammates of Allen’s that he regularly used the “N” word to describe African-Americans. The most bizarre twist is the allegation that, after a hunting trip, Allen cut the head off a deer and decided he wanted to stuff it into a black person’s mailbox.
Allen denies both using the racial epithets and the deer hunting episode. Local authorities and reporters are searching for other sources and perhaps a police report to confirm the deer incident. If they find it, Allen’s political head will be the one mounted.
The senator’s spokespeople dismiss these stories as all part of a giant conspiracy concocted by partisan opponents to destroy him. As the details and allegations mount, however, it is increasingly clear that Allen’s damage is largely self-inflicted.
Once considered a shoe-in for re-election, his campaign is imperiled. Talk of him as a 2008 presidential candidate has ceased.
There’s a white, soft-top Jeep Wrangler in my neighborhood which, for the past year, has featured a blue, Allen-for-Senate sticker on its back bumper. Maybe a stranger peeled it off. But yesterday morning, when I took my black lab Max for his morning walk, the sticker was gone.
So, too, may go the political career of Sen. Felix Macacawitz.
Thomas F. Schaller is an associate political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
