Miscegenation Dogwhistle Watch

by dday

Wow, this is just transparent.

There’s no reason to include Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in this ad. None. It hangs on the word “celebrity” being included, which means it could have just as well been Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Anyway, all the footage is from Obama’s Berlin speech, not the red carpet. This is absolutely meant to juxtapose images of white women with images of a black man. They even dissolve into one another!

Josh Marshall notes:

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.

…here we have a candidate, John McCain, who is running on a record of straight talk and honorable campaigning running a campaign made up mainly of charges reporters are now more or less acknowledging are lies. But there’s precious little drawing together of the contradiction. What’s more, as everyone will acknowledge after the campaign, the McCain campaign is now pushing the caricature of Obama as a uppity young black man whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women.

As he mentions, McCain actually hired the guy who created the “Harold, call me” ad in 2006.

This is very, very obvious. McCain’s ads have overall been more negative and the press occasionally does push back on their falsehoods on a case-by-case basis. Let’s see how they handle this one. Because right now we have a press narrative entirely focused on Obama, whether or not he’s “ready,” whether or not he’s “presumptuous,” whether or not he’s “equipped to lead.” It’s high time there was a bit of focus on McCain, and the truly nasty, racially coded campaign he is now running.

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