Cokie’s Law FTW
by digby
The cable gasbags are all agog with this story this morning, calling for the smelling salts while gleefully showing footage of Jeremiah Wright on a loop.
The New York Times won the morning on Thursday with an A1 story on a new anti-Obama super-PAC, Character Matters, that’s planning on spending $10 million on an ad campaign linking President Obama—a “metrosexual, black Abraham Lincoln”—to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Character Matters is hoping to get either Jon Voight or an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to narrate the spots, which would be produced by GOP ad guru Fred Davis (of “Demon Sheep” fame).
The money for all of this comes from Joe Ricketts, the TD Ameritrade founder, Bison Burgers baron, and, with his family, owner of the Chicago Cubs. Ricketts solidified his status as a campaign finance heavyweight when spent $600,000 in the last month of the election to try to take down Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in 2010. Since then, he’s launched a campaign to eliminate earmarks, given $500,000 to the anti-incumbent Campaign for Primary Accountability, and, earlier this month, spent $200,000 helping state Sen. Deb Fischer win the GOP Senate primary in his home state of Nebraska. (Ricketts’ son, Peter, is a former US Senate candidate and a member of the Republican National Committee.) Ricketts is sick and tired of wasteful spending—so much so that the briefing book outlining the Wright ad is actually entitled “The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”
I would normally be prepared to scold the media at little bit for flogging this story when the truth is that it was only a proposal and the ad hasn’t actually been made. But everyone’s just following Cokie’s Law:
“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”
If you want to get something “out there” feed it to Cokie and the gang and they’ll be happy to do it for you for free — and then tell everyone that it’s “part of the culture” so you have to talk about it. It’s a sweet scam.
Rickets and his group are true jackasses and they may very well have planned to run this ad — or at least they believe the racist message and think that the voters do too. But this is risky for a lot of reasons, and I would not at all be surprised if they are very happy this morning to have it leaked —widely — so they could disavow it. All while everyone’s showing the footage of Jeremiah Wright on a loop all day long. Like I said, it’s a sweet scam. And a cheap one.
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