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Editorial
Willie Horton, Updated for the Trump Era
If an amalgam of McCarthyism and the notorious Willie Horton ad suits your taste, then you want to get hold of a mailer sent to Long Island voters on behalf of the Republican candidate for Nassau County executive. As odious campaign material goes, this one is hard to beat. Yet the candidate, Jack Martins, says he firmly stands by it.
The mailer shows three shirtless Latino men, covered in tattoos and representing MS-13, the vicious gang begun by Central American immigrants in Los Angeles that now menaces Long Island. “Meet Your New Neighbors!” a headline above them says, adding this about Mr. Martins’s Democratic opponent: “Laura Curran will roll out the welcome mat for violent gangs like MS-13!” Ms. Curran, the text says, is “MS-13’s choice for county executive.”
That was the Willie Horton part of the message — a blatant race-based appeal to fear. You may recall the Horton commercial, which the elder George Bush ran in his 1988 presidential campaign. It showed a black man who had raped a white woman and assaulted her husband while free on a Massachusetts prison-furlough program that was supported by Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate. As a vote magnet, it worked for Mr. Bush. Mr. Martins, a former state senator, clearly hopes it does the same for him in Tuesday’s election.
Now for the McCarthyism: “Laura Curran’s campaign is supported and funded by New York City special interest groups.” This is an attempted smear reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy’s heyday, with its suggestion that Ms. Curran shares the views of unnamed groups that “want to make Nassau County a sanctuary county for illegal immigrants.” It’s the old guilt by association.
In fact, Ms. Curran, a county legislator, supports neither sanctuary counties nor sanctuary cities, terms typically applied to localities whose police forces are ordered not to ask about the immigration status of people taken into custody. “It makes MS-13 look like a PAC that’s supporting me,” she said, understandably offended.
Even allowing that a certain nastiness is inevitable as Election Day nears, this utterly misleading immigration ploy crosses the line. It’s a dog-eared page out of the dirty-tricks playbook, updated for the Trump era.
In the close Virginia governor’s race, an ad for the Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, links the Democrat, Ralph Northam, to a sanctuaries-cities policy that “let illegal immigrants who commit crimes back on the street, increasing the threat of MS-13.”
In New Jersey, a plainly desperate Kim Guadagno, the Republican nominee for governor, reached back a decade in a dismal attempt to pin a soft-on-immigrant-crime tag on the Democratic front-runner, Phil Murphy. A Guadagno commercial twists a Murphy comment about undocumented immigrants — his “having their back” — as somehow meaning he supports a brutal killer named Jose Carranza.
Mr. Carranza, an unlawful arrival from Peru, was one of six men found guilty in the execution-style murder of three young people in a Newark schoolyard in 2007. “Murphy,” the Guadagno ad says, “will have the backs of deranged murderers like Carranza.”
“In the sewer” doesn’t begin to describe this drivel.
It’s now the voters’ turn to say if this is what they want in their politics. We’ve declared our support for Mr. Murphy but have not made an endorsement in the Nassau County race. Still, Long Islanders might think about that mailer and ask themselves if they want to be represented by someone who stands proudly, as Mr. Martins does, behind so scurrilous a campaign tactic.
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