New School Board member admits creating race-baiting Web site

Chris Stewart, who on Tuesday won election to the Minneapolis School Board, yesterday admitted that he and some friends created a replica Tammy Lee for Congress Web site laden with racial epithets to lampoon Fifth District Congressman Martin Sabo’s support for Lee, the Independence Party candidate.

Stewart, who is black and is considered a rising star in the DFL Party, said the Web site was “an inside blogger joke that was never meant to be made public.” He said he attempted without success on Tuesday to contact the Lee campaign to apologize.

“It takes the Dumbest Thing Award for me this year,” he said.

The site, which was taken down after Lee campaign staff discovered its origins, called Lee “the Best Choice to Replace Congressman Martin Sabo. After all, she’s white – just like us, and that means we can trust her. We should all agree that a Negro should never replace a great statesman like Martin Sabo.”

The “Meet Tammy Lee” link brings the visitor to a Ku Klux Klan site, and other tabs link to Wikipedia items on “White Power” and “White Nationalism.”

Stewart and a group of friends who blog on americanhotsausage.com replicated the Lee site after Lee had suggested that DFLers endorsed Keith Ellison in order to be “politically correct.”

“It started out as some of us being disillusioned” by Lee’s comments about a return to “identity politics,” which Stewart said he does not support. The site was marked as “political satire” and “not associated with Tammy Lee for Congress,” so Stewart was surprised that anyone would think it was serious. “That page was the most absurd it could possibly be,” he said, “I was mortified by the thought that I would be attacking her.”

Indeed, Stewart had actually met with Independence Party officials, including gubernatorial candidate Peter Hutchinson, prior to declaring his School Board candidacy, and he had told Lee that he would support her if Ellison did not win the September DFL primary. “She should know this isn’t personal,” he said.

That’s not the message Lee got from the Web site. She called it the “lowest, most vile form of sleazeball campaigning” and said Tuesday that the campaign may consider legal action.

Lee campaign advisor George Soule said Wednesday that Stewart’s apology may have removed the need for litigation, but he raised questions about Stewart’s character, calling the Web site “the worst political trash I’ve seen in nearly 40 years of working in political campaigns. No one could possibly construe this as being funny.”

Soule disputed Stewart’s statement that he took the site down as soon as he heard from the Lee campaign, noting that Stewart ridiculed Soule’s correspondence demanding that the site be removed. It was only after the Lee campaign held a press conference Tuesday to condemn the site that Stewart responded.

The Lee campaign noted in its press conference that Stewart was a supporter of Ellison, but the Ellison campaign yesterday released a statement disavowing any knowledge of the site, calling it “is tasteless and clearly goes way over the line.”