Kane: Sykes spot 'patently unfair'

Eugene Kane on the Sykes radio spot:

The furor over choice has sparked a patently unfair radio commercial equating Doyle's stance on school choice with Southern governors such as Orval Faubus and George Wallace, who stood in the schoolhouse door to prevent black children from receiving an education.

I asked one of the ad's co-creators, Mikel Holt, associate publisher of the Milwaukee Community Journal, why the language in the ad was so racially inflammatory, particularly in the way it linked Doyle - the adoptive parent of two African-American adult sons - with two racist Southern governors.

Holt denied the ad is meant to imply Doyle is racist; he said the ad simply represented a new civil rights struggle for black choice students.

My take is the ad's language is just as loaded - and condescending - for blacks as Hillary Clinton telling a Martin Luther King Jr. Day audience that Republicans run the House like "a plantation."

The ad also wrongly suggests that school choice is the paramount issue for most blacks in the 2006 gubernatorial election. It's not.