The annals of “horrible campaign slogans” are littered with poor decisions, poorly-marketed ideas, half-hearted attempts to connect, vague nothingburgers of meaningless sentiment, and other such failures. But few are as tragically, hilariously, inadvertently terrible as the slogan that Blanco mayoral candidate Bruce Peele is running with in his current campaign: “Keep Blanco Blanco.”
As the San Antonio Express-News reports, Peele—a newcomer to Blanco who moved to the city three years ago—intended the slogan to refer to preserving the community’s rural character. “When Peele unveiled the slogan, [councilwoman Maria Guerrero] recalled, ‘He said people want (the town) to stay small. They don’t want it to change. They want to keep the big box stores out,’” the paper reports.
But, well, in a town where the hispanic population rose by 23% between 2000 and 2010, and which is considerably whiter as a whole than the rest of Texas, “Keep Blanco Blanco” sounds just a little bit like “Keep Blanco White.” Which, whoops.
To be certain, it seems extremely unlikely that any candidate would run with a campaign slogan that was “Keep Blanco Blanco” if it were intended to reference race. Not only would it be extremely on-the-nose, but why would a racist candidate be speaking Spanish? And there’s no reason to suspect that Peele, who is attempting to unseat incumbent mayor Chuck Homan, has any strong feelings about the racial makeup of the community whatsoever. We’ll see what happens on May 9th.
