Slublog's Racist Attack on Obama

How is that racist, you ask? Well, first of all, everything bad you say about Obama is racist. But specifically, Joshua Jay Jeremiah Micah Ezekiah Boutros-Boutros Valderaama Marshall says all this "presumptuous, arrogant elitist narcissist" business is just racial code words for "uppity colored:"

I note with interest today, John McCain's new tactic of associating Barack Obama with oversexed and/or promiscuous young white women. (See today's new ad and this from yesterday.) Presumably, a la Harold Ford 2006, this will be one of those strategies that will be a matter of deep dispute during the campaign and later treated as transparent and obvious once the campaign is concluded.

But what I'm most interested in today is the new meme the McCain campaign has been pushing for the last few weeks that Obama is presumptuous, arrogant and well ... just a bit uppity.

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So please keep an eye out for references to Obama's presumptuousness, arrogance, etc., from John King and other reporters. Let us know when you see them and send us in examples -- in text or video. McCain gets to run the campaign he wants. Remember, he hired the operative who put together the Ford/Bimbo ad. But I want to keep tabs on which reporters are helping him retail the message.

These guys are so horny for someone to call Obama a shiftless darkie they're thisclose to saying it themselves.

Thanks to CJ for the Hugh Hewitt tip and of course Slublog for the shop.

Slublog, you just made Josh Marshall's list, buddy.

More: This is how Obama plays the race card, mostly: through surrogates, so he can maintain his pose as "post-racial:"

In the primary, Obama's campaign, with the partial exception of South Carolina, never overtly drove the cries of racism. Part of the candidate's selling point to the white majority is that he isn't a bearer of racial grievance, and he is very careful to preserve that impression. Meanwhile, his surrogates and the media pursued the stories, doing real damage to Clinton's campaign and her husband's legacy.

And among Obama's surrogates are the netroots-- Talking Points Memo in particular:

Around midnight on July 16, New York Times chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney received a terse e-mail from Barack Obama's press office. The campaign was irked by the Times' latest poll and Nagourney and Megan Thee's accompanying front-page piece titled "Poll Finds Obama Isn't Closing Divide on Race," which was running in the morning's paper. Nagourney answered the query, the substance of which he says was minor, and went to bed, thinking the matter resolved.

But, the next morning, Nagourney awoke to an e-mail from Talking Points Memo writer Greg Sargent asking him to comment on an eight-point rebuttal trashing his piece that the Obama campaign had released to reporters and bloggers like The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder and Politico's Ben Smith. Nagourney had not heard the complaints from the Obama camp and had no idea they were so steamed. "I'm looking at this thing, and I'm like, 'What the hell is this?' " Nagourney recently recalled. "I really flipped out."

Obama's attempts to mau-mau (am I allowed to say that?) the press may or may not be successful; but some reporters aren't buying the Obama camp's preferred practice of crying racism at the drop of a hat.

But it definitely won't work with the broader public. So Obama's game here is a dangerous one for him. White people bitterly cling to their resentment that they can't say boo without being accused of being closet, or out and proud, racists. If Obama thinks he's actually going to persuade the middle by claiming that you don't vote for him, you must be a racist, he's in a for a bad surprise.

This worked in the primary, because all liberals are required to pretend that every single cry of racism is valid. Not so among the bitter, clingy folks.

posted by Ace at 04:09 PM

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