When I met Kathleen Antrim (left) two years ago at an International Thriller Writers reception, I had an inkling of her other career as a political columnist…but I never would’ve guessed that she’d be working on a biography of U.S. Senator George Allen, he of “Macaca” infamy. As the controversy surrounding what Allen did or didn’t say about African-Americans when he was a college student grows, Antrim’s publicist wants us all to know that the author thinks the charges are bunk. “It’s disgusting and despicable that they are playing the race card against Allen, a man that grew up in an integrated family and considers many of his father’s teammates family,” Antrim says in a press release issued yesterday. (An “integrated family,” you ask? That’s an interesting take on integration, considering that Allen’s mother suppressed public knowledge of her Jewish ancestry for decades in order to appease George Allen, Sr.’s family, and Allen himself referred publicly to his mother as “French-Italian with a little Spanish blood.”)
But is Antrim’s defense too little too late? She went into the biography project hoping to get the earliest possible access to a frontrunner for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination; now The Weekly Standard wonders if his career will last past November. “Having just stepped out upon the national stage,” writes Matthew Continetti, “Allen now finds himself in danger of being shuffled off of it.”