It's hard to make out, because the video is fuzzy.... But, once you know what it is, it makes sense. It sits folded on a bookcase of trophies and bric-a-brac behind George Allen, who is seated at a desk in his home office. It's right there next to the fax machine. You can see the red field. You can make out the diagonal blue bar. And you can see what looks like a white star. It is the Confederate flag, and it appears in the very first ad that Allen broadcast in 1993, when he ran for governor . . .Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where's Waldo, with the Confederate flag replacing the bespectacled cartoon character. First, as The New Republic reported last week, there's the senior class photo from Palos Verdes High School with Allen wearing a Confederate flag pin. Now we learn that the Confederate flag appears as a decoration in Allen's first statewide ad, even though he has long maintained that the flag did not adorn his home after 1992.
Some conservatives have recently argued that the revelations about Allen's high school photo are irrelevant because the picture is so old. "[I]f we're going to scrutinize people's high school records as we vet them for public office, nobody gets to run," columnist Kathleen Parker wrote last week. But, as revealed by the 1993 campaign ad--as well as the accounts of Allen associates now stepping forward--his embrace of the Confederate flag is even more extensive than tnr previously reported. According to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the flag--on himself, his car, inside his home--or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000.
He's just kicking the Southern Strategy up a notch, is all.
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