Democrats made the Redskins a front in America’s ongoing culture war and it may have backfired in Redskins country – Virginia and Maryland – and may have misfired in South Dakota. FOX News is the only outlet examining the topic. FOX is the only outlet that challenges Democrats who attack the team name.
Razor’s edge in Virginia
Virginia’s Mark Warner did not join 50 of his colleagues in a letter to the NFL demanding they force the Washington Redskins to change their team name. Warner said that Congress should stay out of the issue, although he believes the name will change eventually. (Clinton Portis believes the name will change over Dan Snyder’s dead body. See? “Eventually.”)
Ed Gillespie, his GOP rival, hammered Warner for not repudiating Sen. Maria Cantwell’s proposal to withdraw the NFL’s tax-exempt status unless the league forced the Washington Redskins to change its team name to a flower or butterfly.
Warner was strategically silent. Gillespie declared he would oppose the use of tax law in that way.
Redskins Park is in Virginia. The team has a state-sponsored training camp in Richmond. Observers said Warner would win in a cakewalk. Voters pushed Gillespie to a near upset no one saw coming.
Meanwhile in Maryland…
Like Gillespie, GOP Governor-elect Larry Hogan openly supported the Redskins’ right to its team name in contrast to Democratic Lt. Governor Anthony Brown (no relation) who called the name “inappropriate.”
Change the name never was a big issue in the Maryland campaign, but the governor’s race slipped away from Brown. He was the front-runner last spring. That is dangerous when supporters stay home in the belief their votes are not needed.
Hogan blasted Brown this morning for hypocrisy. Brown refers to the Redskins as Washington’s football team while wearing Redskins merchandise to games. “Washington football team” is a continuing insult to Redskins fans.
Hog Heaven knows of several Maryland voters who changed their party affiliation from Democratic to Independent because the incessant nagging by Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. It may have harmed Brown, the only Democrat to lose a statewide office.
Madam Mayor gets her chance
D.C. is a one-party town. Muriel Bowser was coronated Mayor after winning the Democratic Primary last April. As councilwoman, Bowser joined her colleagues in condemning the name of the Washington Football Team.
Bowser is D.C.’s first female mayor since Sharon Pratt Kelly who lost the Football Team’s stadium deal to Maryland in the 1990s. Losing the R*dskins to the suburbs left a gaping hole in the soul of the District.
Kelly assumed that Jack Kent Cooke had no choice but to build his stadium in D.C. where old RFK now stands. Cooke thought otherwise. The City Council holds the same assumption today. So what happens when an irresistible Progressive force meets an immovable NFL owner? The Suburbs.
Bidding for a new Redskins stadium will begin in earnest within the next three years. With this outcome, Maryland and Virginia are less likely to set conditions about the team name. That may be enough to restrain progressive impulses in D.C.
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Did the Redskins name issue affect the Senate election in Virginia and the Governor’s election in Maryland?
Thrown for a loss in South Dakota
There is a political theory that Harry Reid pushed his Democratic colleagues to sign that letter to the NFL to attract Native American voters in South Dakota senate race.
If so, it failed badly.
Republican Mike Rounds won big over Democrat Rick Weiland who counted on support by the reservation community. Rounds would have won even if two independents did not syphon votes away from Weiland.
That’s like the Redskins going all out on a blitz and not getting to Teddy Bridgewater. Game over.
What were they thinking?
Two of the 50 Democratic U.S. Senators who signed that snippy letter to the NFL have lost their reelection campaign.
- Mark Udall, Colorado
- Kay Hagan, North Carolina
Mary Landrieu faces a runoff in the Louisiana election. Mark Begich’s race in Alaska is still too close to call as I write this. West Virginia’s Jay Rockefeller is retiring, but even he may not have survived the Republican wave that swept the GOP to control of the Senate.
Republican Shelley Capito won the open seat in a landslide.
Voters gave Republicans a 52-seat majority in the incoming Senate, which mean’s Cantwell’s anti-Redskins pandering is in a coma, if not dead. Or not.
Republicans defended the Redskins name the moment the president said he would think about changing it. Then Democratic Senators made their grandstand play.
You get the feeling that if Obama supports the team name tomorrow, the GOP would move to ban it because … Obama.
Republicans would like to simplify the entire tax code. One of their ideas is to remove the tax-exempt status of professional sports league offices. So it could come back on the NFL, but not as a change the name issue.
Think the NFL is worried? Naw.
Every NFL TEAM is for-profit and pays taxes. The NFL Office provides league administrative functions like scheduling, labor negotiation and enforcing rules. It has no revenue and no profit. It is non-profit and tax exempt. SENATORS KNOW THIS, so the whole notion of withdrawing NFL tax exemption from teams is a massive con job…akin to “cancelling the Redskins trademark” having a meaningful impact on the trademark.
A super-majority of everyday sports fans do not see The Redskins® as a slur. They do not agree the team name should change. How that affected their vote is still a question.
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