Virginia’s Republican Senate candidate, Ed Gillespie, ran an ad during Monday Night Football’s game between the Redskins and the Cowboys criticizing Senate majority leader Harry Reid for trying to force the former team to change its name, and his opponent Mark Warner for not saying where he stood on those attempts:

Embedded video

This was greeted with substantial merriment among reporters on Twitter, with some quipping that this will be what finally puts Gillespie — a long shot, for sure — over the top. But, for one, the Redskins’ keeping their name is actually one of those proverbial 70–30 or 80–20 issues, or close to a 90–10 one, in fact. The divide is probably almost inverted among those in the sports or political media who express an opinion. Of course almost no one is going to cast his vote based on the Redskins’ name, but the intensity gap doesn’t obviously favor one side or the other — so why shouldn’t Ed put it out there? People do make decisions at the margins.

But the irony is that while Gillespie was drawing attention to the team name, surely a nice cultural identifier, he’s not the one who made it a political issue. Congressional Democrats and the Senate majority leader Mark Warner supports are the ones who’ve made it a political pigskin. Regardless of how the election goes, it was almost worth broadcasting the ad just so that a few Americans who don’t live at the intersection of C-SPAN and PTI learn about Democrats’ quite real obsession with a name almost no Americans (or Native Americans!) object to.

Earlier this year, fifty members of the world’s greatest deliberative body signed a letter calling on NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to change the team’s name (though Warner, to his credit, didn’t join it). Then Senator Reid co-sponsored a bill in September — welcome to football season! — to revoke the NFL’s tax-exempt status unless it stops promoting the Redskins name. Getting rid of the sports leagues’ tax exemption might be a perfectly fine idea (it’s hardly worth the ink either way), but proposing to do so for one league unless it changes a trademark practice for one team? This is Reid’s unique combination of bumbling and bullying at its best.

I’m sure it’s a little unrealistic for Gillespie to expect Warner to rebuke his own conference leader over the Redskins bill, but this seems like a perfectly good way to remind voters that, while Republicans are writing actual tax-reform bills, Senate Democrats are trying to adorn the tax code with their PC warpaint.