UPDATE: Rahm Emanuel said during a Monday night mayoral forum that Carol Moseley Braun's comments were not being interpreted correctly. Read more here.
Over the weekend, Carol Moseley Braun won the endorsement of one of the most influential black thinkers in America, while also making controversial remarks likening Rahm Emanuel to Adolf Hitler.
The comments came at an event with Cornel West, the Princeton professor and author of such influential works as Race Matters and The Future of the Race. At the event, West spoke of the prerogatives of the next mayor, and had some harsh words for another candidate, as WBEZ reports:
"I believe a Rahm Emanuel victory would be a slap in the face," West said. "I'm here to support poor and working people - specifically black Chicago."
West said Chicago can do better - in the spirit of Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor. He called Emanuel an outsider and intimated that he's tethered to the corporate elite and big business.
But when Moseley Braun took the stage, she hit a nerve with one of her remarks.
She made a reference to "The Producers," the Mel Brooks play-turned-movie satirizing the cult of personality around Adolf Hitler. In it, one of the characters describes Hitler as "kind" and "gentle."
Braun made an analogy to Emanuel, the front-runner in the mayor's race, who is Jewish. The Sun-Times shared her comments about Rahm:
"The joke in it was, he was a kind man, a gentle man," said Braun about comments in Mel Brooks' satirical movie. "We are getting the kind man, the gentle man on television."
She was referring to Emanuel's notoriously stormy temper, compared with his even-tempered television commercials, and denied afterwards that she was comparing Emanuel to the Nazi dictator. "I was not comparing him to Adolf Hitler; print that," Moseley Braun said, according to FOX Chicago. "I was trying to say...the kind, gentle concern for the public that is being portrayed in these ads does not square with the record."
Still, in a campaign marred by gaffes, the latest remark doesn't stand out as a particularly bright moment for the former U.S. Senator.