Ways to Get Fired in Politics

Bill Scranton's last campaign for Governor in Pennsylvania ended badly when I was a kid. This one hasn't started any better, thanks in large part to his campaign manager...

Bill Scranton's campaign manager, James Seif, said he knew he was in trouble as soon as the words came tumbling off his tongue.

In a live call-in show on the Pennsylvania Cable Network, Seif told viewers that Scranton's main opponent for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Lynn Swann, who is African American, was the "rich white guy in the campaign."

By the end of the show, callers were demanding an apology from Seif, and within an hour Scranton had fired him. His dismissal came at a time when Scranton has been trying to slow Swann's increasing momentum toward capturing the party's endorsement on Feb. 11.

"There's no excuse. It was a stupid thing to say," said Seif, who added that the comment was not intended as a racial slur.

Seif, 60, said he was trying to say that Swann, who portrays himself as a political outsider, was really part of the establishment.

"I tried to underline the idea by turning around race, to show that it was the opposite of what it looked like," said Seif, who served in the Reagan administration and was head of the state Department of Environmental Protection under Gov. Tom Ridge. "There was no racial thought to it."

Thanks for fixing all those stereotypes about the GOP, Mr. Seif. I'm not up on the issue enough to understand whether Swann or Scranton would be my choice, although I've never really thought of Scranton as a conservative stalwart. But this is the sort of stupidity that drives me insane -- I know the point Seif was trying to make, but his choice of words was beyond stupid. At least he's not trying to defend it.

The only question I have is what would happen if someone on the Democratic side, particularly another African-American, said the same thing in the general election? Would they get a free pass? Before you draw conclusions, let's keep an eye on the campaigns by Ken Blackwell for Governor in Ohio and Michael Steele for Senator in Maryland. Steele's already caught some flak from the racial establishment of the left, as we recall here...

The head of the state Senate in 2001 called Steele, then head of the state GOP, an "Uncle Tom." During Steele's 2002 campaign for lieutenant governor, Oreos were distributed at a debate, and an editorial in The (Baltimore) Sun said he brought little to the ticket but his skin color.

In the end, this is only a hypothetical, and it's unlikely to happen in Pennsylvania, where Ed Rendell's too skillful a politician to allow his minions to do something so dumb. Besides, Rendell has enough integrity and savvy to jump on anyone in his party who would try such a thing, and defend Swann. But let's see what happens elsewhere.