The left can dish it out, but it can’t take it, when it comes to underground street posters.  Do you remember a wave of protests from the left when President Bush was portrayed as Hitler or a monkey?  Neither do I.

You can tell that the guerrilla campaign portraying Maxine Waters as a “poverty pimp” is hitting home by the ferocity of the protests against it.  CBS Los Angeles reports:

Civil-rights leaders Monday called for an investigation into what they described as a racially offensive campaign against local Congresswoman Maxine Waters. (snip)

Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson and other activists began taking down the posters at various locations Sunday and are demanding a “fast track investigation” by the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

“We’re highly offended, we’re disgusted by it, we hope this is not the start of something that we’ll continue to see not only in politics, but beyond in Southern California,” said Hutchinson.

CBS notes that there is no indication that Waters’s opponent, John R. Wood, Jr., has anything to do with the campaign.  He has issued a statement to that effect.

All I can say is that, people have a right to free speech, but that I represent a fundamentally different brand of politics. Whatever people think of Maxine Waters, we should try to call attention to our differences and challenge our opponents on them without being disrespectful. That’s really what my campaign has been about.

But he is an interesting man, as Rosslyn Smith notes:

I started to investigate who was running against Maxine Waters.  Considering that California now has a "jungle primary" I found it interesting that Waters' opponent on Tuesday identifies himself as a Republican.  He also says he campaigned for Obama in 2008 because he liked what Obama was saying about one America.    

John R, Wood, Jr.  age 27 identifies himself as bi-racial.  His grandfather, Randy Wood, was a white music producer from Tennessee who founded Dot Records.  His mother is a jazz and R&B singer from LA.  His background is in music and digital marketing. His white father tended to vote Republican and his black mother Democrat so he also grew up listening to both sides of political arguments. 

It is hard to connect the articulate, soft-spoken Wood with the poverty pimp posters.  But plastering a neighborhood with imaginative posters is an established way for a music act that doesn’t have a lot of money to promote its appearances.  Even if Wood is not behind the posters, I also find it interesting that while he is from the other end of the social spectrum from these angry young black men from Chicago, his conclusion is similar: The divisive policies of the Democratic Party have failed to serve the needs of the inner city. 

Charles Johnson notes that Waters does not even live in the district she represents.  No, she lives in a seven-figure mansion in formerly WASPy Hancock Park, one of the sites of the Poverty Pimp posters:

(via Google Earth)

Hat tip: Powerline