May 9, 2014

It is ironic that election season often highlights the rhetorical gravitas of candidates pandering for a cheap vote.  Already during this election season, some candidates are deploying divisive and exclusionary speech to play on people’s fears and ignorance. Campaign season is just heating up and we are already witnessing name-calling and fear-mongering.

On the national scene, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) accused President Barack Obama last month, of preferring one religious group over another, stating, Oklahomans “regularly ask me why we have an administration that suppresses our Judeo-Christian values while praising Islam.”

Inhofe’s statement perpetuates both an “us-vs-them” mentality which rejects the view that America’s strength lies in her diversity and implies that Islam does not share the same values as the Judeo-Christian traditions.

In the last election cycle, voters rejected this type of divisive and offensive rhetoric. Former Congressmen Alan West (R-FL) and Joe Walsh (R-IL) both made incendiary and bigoted remarks about Islam, and paid the price with their seats.

Inhofe’s absurd accusation begs the question: why is fear mongering through anti-Muslim rhetoric still a go-to tactic for so many candidates when it carries a high risk of political suicide?

The same is true on the state level. The California gubernatorial race has also been struck by similar tactics. Tim Donnelly accused his fellow Republican primary-challenger, Neel Kashkari, a Hindu American, of pushing Sharia law, describing it as “the seditious religious-political-legal code authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide under a global theocracy.”

In response to this, Harmeet Dhillon, vice chair of the California Republican Party, called Donnelly out, saying he was attempting "to trade on bigotry, racism, hatred of the other, and hysteria."

Dhillon’s comments encompass many voters’ attitudes towards divisive language. Candidates in 2010 and 2012 who played on anti-Muslim sentiment in order to get ahead in the polls “alienated large swaths of the electorate… Many of the loudest anti-Muslim candidates lost, and for a number of those who won, victory came by the smallest of margins, often driven by forces that went well beyond anti-Muslim rhetoric.”

Embracing diversity and serving all voters and all Americans should be a prerequisite for running for public office. The face of America is increasingly mixed race, multicultural and diverse, meaning that the window of opportunity for candidates to gain votes by playing on fear of the “other” is closing. Until then, we have a shared obligation of continuing to speak up in the face of offensive views and demand more from our elected representatives in all areas of public life.