In Arkansas, the Good, the Brad, and the Ugly
Mores about race have changed since the ’90s, but there is such a thing as overcorrection.
Explaining her vote for Donald Trump in 2024, the New York Times bestselling author and former Democratic strategist Evan Barker memorably if provocatively said, “Instead of thinking about health care, or the social safety net, I decided to vote for the side that I knew didn’t hate my white son.”
Vice President J.D. Vance said in an interview that one of the things he was proudest of was the second Trump administration’s efforts to roll back “institutionalized anti-white, anti-male discrimination in this country.”
“Again, there’s a lot more work to do, but, like, we’re not discriminating against people, black or white, based on the color of their skin in job applications,” he said. “We’re telling the universities, you’re not allowed to discriminate against white guys, against dudes, against anyone.”
Vance in this interview was speaking to the young men who voted for Trump in 2024 but might stay home in the midterm elections, with narrow Republican congressional majorities on the line. At least some of those young voters saw themselves being left out of the intersectionality sweepstakes in the university and excluded from the protections of civil rights laws in the workplace.
It was in this context that Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders found herself at the center of a conservative social media firestorm over what she surely thought was an effective and inoffensive ad touting her welfare-to-work policies.
The ad features a lazy welfare recipient named Brad who sits around all day playing video games and eating cheese balls. “Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession,” Sanders says with a chuckle, noting that the taxpayers footing the bill work hard. It’s lighter than most such TV spots, even finishing with a happy ending as Brad puts on a tie and goes to work. A win for Arkansas!
But the ad was perhaps a little too light for some. Brad, our welfare king, is white.
Fraud in government social welfare programs has been one of the top issues raised by Republicans in what has otherwise been a tough election year. The Minnesota Somali daycare fraud scandal caused Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, to abandon his campaign for a third term and is one reason the race to fill the state’s open Senate seat is unexpectedly close. Vance chairs the White House’s fraud prevention task force.
Getting welfare recipients to work has been a conservative policy goal for decades, though center-right attitudes about mothers receiving public benefits staying home with their children have softened in recent years. But this was a central tenet of the successful bipartisan welfare reform of the 1990s, which, though signed into law by President Bill Clinton—an Arkansan whose ascent to the White House paved the way for Sanders’s father to become governor—was supported by conservative think tanks more than liberal ones.
Sarah Sanders rose to national prominence as the spokeswoman of the White House during part of Trump’s first term. She would surely be on the vice presidential shortlist of the 2028 Republican presidential nominee. Or at least she would have been, before she broke bad with Brad.
Whoever wrote and cast the Brad ad was probably seeking to avoid the normal pitfall of Republican messaging on welfare or crime being treated as a racist dogwhistle. Daycare fraud and weekend prison furloughs for violent criminals are legitimate objects of public concern, but Democrats can always ask whether so many voters would care if the Somalis weren’t the fraudsters or Willie Horton (who actually went by William) wasn’t black.
Brad seemed like a clever way out of this familiar trap. Except many conservatives thought having a white male welfare cheat was itself racist, or at least a bit tone-deaf a few weeks out from trying to turn young white men out for the midterms.
In a DEI world, white men are the last people it is socially acceptable to label as welfare queens. Many also found it improbable that ol’ Brad really was demographically representative of Arkansan welfare caseloads, though that is in dispute.
At the very least, we are living in a different world than the one where top Republican consultants would necessarily be embarrassed by the Willie Horton ad or afraid of being called racist for exposing Somali daycare fraud. (Nick Shirely, you jest!) But not everyone in the GOP has caught up.
Yet the current freakout feels a bit more like practicing identity politics than rejecting it. Did we really strike a blow against wokeness in order to freak out about the race of fake welfare recipients? Are we pursuing a multiracial, working-class political coalition or Woke 2 for white folks? And which is more likely to win elections?
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