If Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) wakes up on Nov. 8th without a job, that may turn out to be the most apt epitaph for his now flagging reelection campaign.

As you now no doubt know, Sen. Allen is in bruising back and forth with the Webb campaign and a good part of the Virginia media over debate moderator Peggy Fox’s decision to ask him whether his maternal grandfather was Jewish and whether he considered this part of his ethnic or religious heritage.

Ordinarily the religion or ethnicity of a candidate’s parents or grandparents might not be suitable grist for a campaign trail question – though similar revelations emerged in 2004 about Wesley Clark and John Kerry, with no similar candidate eruption.  But in the brouhaha over Fox’s question, everyone seems to forget the fact that this year’s often bizarre Virginia senate campaign has gotten onto this territory because of Allen’s own original fib.

Let’s go back to Aug. 11, the day when Allen’s campaign spiral began.  That’s when he called Webb campaign ‘tracker’ S.R. Sidarth  ‘Macaca’ at a campaign event in Break, a town in southwest Virginia.

The Allen campaign first lamely insisted that ‘Macaca’ was a reference to Sidarth’s Mohawk style haircut – even though Siddarth didn’t and doesn’t sport a Mohawk. 

Then the Allen camp insisted that ‘Macaca’ – a word that has at least some currency as a racial epithet in American white supremacist circles – was just a random concatenation of syllables Allen came up with that had no particular meaning at all.

By the logic of campaigns and campaign operatives, the Allen camp probably had no choice.  He could hardly concede that he knew ‘Macaca’ was a racial slur and had used it in a careless moment.  That would have ended his campaign and probably his political career.

So the campaign settled on one of those agreed fibs that are commonplace in American politics on both sides of the divide.  It doesn’t add up.  No one’s probably really going to believe it.  But with no clear and direct evidence to contradict the candidate’s claim, the story just fades away, with partisans on both sides repeating their favored interpretation of events.

But in Allen’s case there was a problem.

As a host of bloggers quickly revealed, the word “Macaca” has a particular and highly relevant provenance.  In colonial-era North Africa, particularly in the Francophone colonies, “Macaca” was a rough equivalent of what we now tidily refer to in America as the “N-word.”

On first blush, that seems a rather distant connection for a man with Allen’s Son of the South image.  But it turns out that Allen’s mother Etty was born and raised in the then-French colony of Tunisia, where the word was apparently widely understood among the French colonial population.  That in itself made Allen’s already strained denial lose what little credibility it had.

It was only after the Allen campaign refused to address this new evidence which cast doubt on his denial in Macaca-gate that attention turned to his mother’s background and Allen’s seemingly longstanding resistance to any public references to his mother’s family’s Jewish heritage.

On August 25th an article appeared in the Jewish newspaper The Forward, which examined why Allen has apparently studiously avoided public reference to his mother’s Jewish heritage, referring to her as a mix of French, Italian and Spanish despite the fact that her family name – Lumbroso — is that of a illustrious Sephardic Jewish family with connections to each of those three countries.  When Allen confirmed his Jewish heritage in the aftermath of the debate-question flap, he insisted that he hadn’t known about it until the article in The Forward appeared a month earlier. 

But that was hard to figure given Allen’s apparent history of demanding retractions when reporters in the past discussed his mother’s Jewish heritage.  Late last month, Bob Gibson, a veteran columnist for the Charlottesville Daily Progress told The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza that “the only time that George Allen ever wanted a correction from me in 27 years of covering his races was when I wrote about his mother’s Jewish family origins. He insisted, through a press secretary, that his mother was raised a Christian.”

Allen’s mother is apparently of advanced age.  And people anywhere on the political spectrum can understand Allen’s reasonable vexation at having her drawn into a divisive and intense political campaign.  But this whole saga – from the first moment the Macaca hit the fan – has told us volumes about Allen’s potent brew of race-tinged thinking, mendacious backpedaling and telling discomfort about revelations about his own non-white-Christian heritage.  And the senator from Virginia has brought it all on himself. 

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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