This is an opinion column.

When I was much younger, I used to say “tar baby” a lot.

I never said it as a slur but only as a metaphor for messes that, once you get into them, you could never get out of.

As in, “If we invade Iraq, this thing’s going to be a damn tar baby.”

And I wasn’t the only one. In 2006, Mitt Romney said it at a fundraiser when describing Boston’s infrastructure money pit, the Big Dig. John McCain got in the same mess a year later. Both apologized. (Remember when politicians did that? Weird, right?) We all should have taken a clue from Disney when it locked “Song of the South” and Br’er Rabbit in a vault it has refused to ever reopen.

Even though no one ever called me out, I quit saying it, too.

Because how a message is received is at least as important as how it’s intended, and you can’t say you don’t care what other people think without saying you don’t care about other people. Ignoring that isn’t being transgressive or politically incorrect. It’s called being a jerk.

A jerk like Bradley Byrne.

The congressman from south Alabama is running for the U.S. Senate, and his campaign is not doing well. In all of the polling I’ve seen, he’s fallen behind the out-of-work college football coach, Tommy Tuberville, and Jeff Sessions, whom Donald Trump called his “biggest mistake.”

Now, to pull himself out of the ditch, Byrne has cut an ad that questions the patriotism of all of Fox & Friends’ least favorite brown people.

It starts with Byrne sitting by the firepit behind his house and reflecting on a brother he lost. Personal and reflective — nothing wrong there.

However, it’s when we look into the fire that this thing go amiss. There in the flames, we see the face of Rep. Ilhan Omar, then NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, then the complete Squad: Reps. Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.

At this point, you have to wonder, are there any white people Byrne doesn’t like? What are the odds? Less than nine percent of Congress is women of color, and Byrne dings four in a row? Does Doug Jones not burn hot enough for him?

It should be noted this isn’t the first time Bryne has targeted these women. Last year, he offered to pay their way to Venezuela. Inviting progressives to love it or leave it has been a favorite rhetorical tactic of racists since Bull Connor gave John Lewis and his Freedom Rider friends a free ride to the Tennessee state line.

But at least those women are elected officials. Byrne drags Kaepernick into this, too, calling him “entitled” because even he knows better than to say “uppity” anymore.

Disagree with Kaepernick’s method, if you must, but giving up millions of dollars and the peak years of his career to protest police brutality and police-involved shootings is a bigger sacrifice than Byrne has ever made.

But never mind all that. Why the heck is he even in this ad? Why are any of these folks in this ad? Do they live in Alabama? Are they running for office here?

Because old Alabama politics never get old. There are plenty of white liberals Byrne could have othered in his ad, but all five he picked are — not. That says a lot about whose votes he wants and whose he doesn’t.

This is the sort of stuff a candidate for U.S. Senate, Rep. Bradley Byrne, is sharing on his Facebook page.

On Twitter, I tweaked Byrne for his ad and a handful of his supporters jumped in to say I was being overly sensitive or just taking a cheap shot. Byrne wasn’t calling these folks out because they are people of color; he was calling them out for being “radicals” who don’t love America.

But here’s the thing. Even if you give Byrne the benefit of the doubt, the ad’s still racist.

If not because it’s spiteful to people of color, then because it’s wholly indifferent to what they might think.

Let’s assume all of those arguments are right and Byrne can’t stand the five folks in his ad only because he believes they don’t love America enough. Did he or anyone on his campaign stop to ask what people of color might think of it? Did they consider what message putting a black face in a fire might send to black people?

Or did they just not care?

I’ve never been perfect and none of us are. But I learned. I tried to do better, to care about what other people thought of what I said, especially when it wasn’t what I meant.

Byrne could, too, if he wanted. He’s certainly capable of change, only he’s moving in the wrong direction. He could do better. He could be better. But that might not get him elected.

Byrne is desperate. He probably should have ended this campaign before it started and certainly he should have cut his losses when Sessions entered the race. But he couldn’t stop.

Instead, he’s trying to hang on — not by making promises for what he’d do for Alabama, but by demeaning others and debasing himself. Rather than losing gracefully, he’s going to let this thing take him with it.

It’s almost like he got close enough to a thing to touch it, and now he can’t let go.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb.

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