Ellen Sauerbrey, as a U.S. assistant secretary of state, speaking to media at the U.S. embassy in Amman, August 28, 2007 (Muhammad Hamed / Reuters)

Earlier this week, a question was prompted: Was Ronald Reagan a racist? Many, many said yes. I have a piece about it, here. I give some of my own thoughts (natch). More important, probably, I give some of Lou Cannon’s. He is the Reagan biographer whom someone on television — Al Hunt, I believe — once described as “Reagan’s Boswell.”


Don’t want politics or race? I have a little music, if you’d like: a new episode of my podcast Music for a While. This one brings Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Reich, and more — even some of my beloved Robby Dupree.

Back to politics and race for a moment. I have been meaning to write something about Ellen Sauerbrey, the Maryland Republican, whom Matt Continetti mentioned in this blog a few weeks ago. Two cycles in a row — 1994 and 1998 — she was the GOP nominee for governor, losing to the Democrat Parris Glendening each time.

I’ve written about the 1998 race, in particular, in several pieces, and I would like to quote from one of them — a piece about Bob Shrum, the famous Democratic politico, who had Glendening as a client:

The race was neck and neck until the final days of the campaign, when Glendening and Shrum played the race card. Really, that is understating it: They lit that card and proceeded to torch the landscape. As a state legislator, Sauerbrey had voted against minority set-asides and a “hate crimes” bill. She had also opposed a measure — deviously labeled a “civil-rights act” — that had to do with sexual-harassment suits, and that was ultimately quashed by the Democratic state senate. Reaching his lowest, Shrum unleashed an ad that smeared Sauerbrey as a racist, with a “shameful record on civil rights.” (Just to be sure, he also blanketed black communities with a flier that did the same.) A good portion of the state was aghast. Several black Democrats, including Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, rose to Sauerbrey’s defense. Schmoke told the press pointedly that he knew the “difference between a political conservative and a racist.” He made clear that he did not regard the Shrum spot as “truth-in-advertising.” Schmoke refused to make an ad for Glendening that faulted Sauerbrey on civil-rights grounds. Even The New Republic balked, editorializing against the “dishonorable” practice of “race-baiting.” It also noted that a “short-run gain to the governor may come at some cost to the racial atmosphere in his state.” The ad, however, worked its terrible magic. It apparently frightened black Marylanders, boosting their turnout and putting Glendening over the top. According to Campaigns & Elections magazine, this was the “Most Brutally Effective Attack Spot” of the year.

Ellen Sauerbrey said to me, “If you attack people on something like their environmental record, after the election, you haven’t done any lasting harm. But when you divide and polarize communities on the basis of race, I think it has long-term and very nasty effects.”


I have quoted her often, and believe she is right. (Is it necessary to say that both Left and Right play racial politics, nastily?) And I’ll always love Kurt Schmoke for his statement about knowing the “difference between a political conservative and a racist.” That was a huge statement, coming from that source, in that (foul) atmosphere.