Hyuck, Hyuck: Obama Campaign Easily Feeds "McCain Racist Miscegenation" Storyline to NYT

Not exactly a tough sell, now is it?

The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — suggesting to voters that he’s nothing more than a bubble-headed, publicity-seeking celebrity.

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

Mr. Obama called Mr. McCain on the ploy, saying, quite rightly, that the Republicans are trying to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills.’’

But Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, had a snappy answer. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” he said. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.’’

The retort was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. It puts the sin for the racial attack not on those who made it, but on the victim of the attack.

It also — and we wish this were coincidence, but we doubt it — conjurs up another loaded racial image.

The phrase dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck” entered the national lexicon during the O.J. Simpson saga. Robert Shapiro, one of Mr. Simpson’s lawyers, famously declared of himself, Johnny Cochran and the rest of the Simpson defense team, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”

If you listened to Rick Davis defending himself from Obama Communications Director Andrea Mitchell below, you know the Obama campaign has been peddling the "racial attack" storyline to the media (and bottomdwelling bloggers, of course) for two days.

This is what Obama does. Hillary supporters were driven bonkers by this during the primaries. On the surface, Obama pretends to be post-racial, while actually making expressly racial appeals on occasion.

But it's behind the scenes where he plays the race card again and again. He know it will backfire if he himself is out there screaming racism with all the subtlety of Al Sharpton waiting for a cab. So instead he gets his surrogates to do it for him -- while his top advisers frantically dial the media all day trying to get them to do Obama's dirty work for them.

And usually, the media is more than happy to play campaign coordinator for Obama.

Just ask Hillary.

Question: Does the media have the responsibility to report on what stories a campaign is pushing to them secretly? I realize this is hypothetical, since they'll never drop dime on their beloved Obama.

But if a campaign consistently denies it's making racially-tinged attacks on an opponent, while secretly pushing those attacks every hour to media allies, doesn't the media have a responsibility to report on what the campaign is really doing, hidden from public view?

Or does the media consider itself an actual, formal partner in Obama's election campaign?

Everyone in the MSM knows damn well that the Obama campaign is pushing the racial appeals behind the scenes. They know that, because they're the ones getting the frantic calls from Obama's people "suggesting" such storylines.

How long is the media going to continue this charade? How long will they falsely portray Obama as post-racial and trans-racial when they know damn well the campaign is hyper-racial on phone calls with them, explicitly attempting to racialize just about every issue and ad and statement that Obama gets peeved about?

Or is this just their Special Little Secret with their Special Little Friend?

Racist Organization Insinuates That Obama Will Steal Their White Women: Why, just look at this hypersexual shot of a white woman with face cast dangerously close to Obama's swarthy nethers!

That's from this racist political organization.

Thanks to BumperStickerist.

posted by Ace at 06:32 PM

| Access Comments