I learned about buying and selling Woof Tickets while teaching graphic arts in the New York city public schools. In my students’ neighborhood, if you were able to intimidate someone, that person bought your Woof Ticket. To survive in such a neighborhood, a student had to be able to sell but never buy a Woof Ticket. Buying and selling Woof Tickets also extends into the world of adults and politics. In fact, in one case, selling a Woof Ticket may have achieved a seat on the Supreme Court.

On Oct. 11, 1991, at the hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Clarence Thomas’s confirmation appeared to be in doubt when the committee took a break. Upon reconvening, Chairman Biden asked Judge Thomas whether he had anything to say. In vehement response, Judge Thomas cleverly played the race card. He did not just respond, he attacked with his “high-tech lynching” retort. Mr. Thomas said: “And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”

Not one Democrat senator had the ability to negate or challenge Mr. Thomas’s Woof. Hence, Judge Thomas was able to sell a Woof Ticket and win a lifetime appointment as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Judge Thomas knew about selling Woof Tickets and had prepared the words, “high-tech lynching” earlier, to be used if needed.

Consequently, any national discussion about race and bigotry ought to include an understanding of how buying and selling Woof Tickets works in daily life. For example, Andrew Breitbart’s distorted TV staging of Shirley Sherrod’s NAACP speech resulted in the Obama White House, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the President and CEO of the NAACP buying Mr. Breitbart’s Woof Ticket. In other words, Breitbart’s dishonest mangling of Sherrod’s speech intimidated the aforementioned into buying his lies as a Woof Ticket.

In the 2000 national election, the GOP borrowed corporate jets and flew three planeloads of thugs to Florida where they disrupted and frightened the chad counters. By allowing this Republican behavior to intimidate them, the Democrats bought the GOP’s Woof Ticket. Sen. John Kerry may have lost his presidential bid when he did not fight against the Swift Boaters’ incessant intimidation, thereby, selling Woof Tickets.

During the 1930s and beyond, the bigots and antiSemites of that era included Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo and Rep. John E. Rankin from Mississippi, Father Charles E. Coughlin, Gerald K. Smith and others. Those bigots could not accept that the then new United States had become a mishmash of many new ethnic and religious groups. Today’s bigots have new names and are less direct in spewing forth their hatred, physical threats and lies on TV, radio and the Internet.

Democrats should stop allowing themselves to be intimidated by today’s bigots and start selling Woof Tickets to these GOP proxies such as right-wing radio propagandists and groups akin to the Swift Boaters and Tea Party Patriots. Democrats should organize to start selling their Woof Tickets, around the clock, to Republicans via the Internet, Facebook, Google, Twitter, other electronic platforms, press releases, and talking continually in a no-nonsense moderated voice to expose Republican spin if not outright lies. Indeed, Republican proxy shrill talk and disruptive yelling instead of a dialogue about government being an enemy, health care, or the deficit are smoke screens hiding their real fear about accepting a president who is not a white Christian. This is demonstrated by Sen. Russ Feingold’s recent comment in The New York Times: “A conscious decision was made by certain groups to destroy this presidency the minute it started.”

Currently, President Obama is using his bully pulpit to sell Woof Tickets to Republicans. Indeed, as Thomas Friedman wrote recently in The New York Times, “I’d love to see the President come out, guns blazing.” If Democrats and old-fashioned moderate Republicans can muster the courage to join President Obama in selling Woof Tickets to radical right-wing Republicans, whose two basic problems are an inability to accept that the President of the U.S. is black, and they no longer rule the roost, November may bring more Democrats to Congress.

Herbert Foster is the author of Ribbin’, Jivin’, and Playin’ the Dozens and is completing the manuscript for Ghetto to Ghetto: Yiddish and Jive in American Life. He lives in Edgartown.