This is How They'll Play the Game

Remember when we were kids, our coaches always stressed that the most important thing wasn’t whether we won or lost, it was how we played the game? Well forget all that when it comes to Obama. He knows he can’t win clean next year, so he’ll do whatever he can to win dirty or take the body politic down with him if he can’t win at all. The latest evidence — one of Obama’s allies has found a racial undertow in a perfectly benign Mitt Romney ad. Here’s the ad, which is Romney’s first televised ad of the season.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3a7FC0Jkv8

The ad is all about Obama’s failed policies, and unfulfilled promises. But that’s not what the Democrats want you to come away with.

[A]s happened in 2008, the Obama campaign relied on a surrogate to make charges of racism.  Just as Team Obama left it to James Clyburn to play the race card on Bill Clinton, this time Team Obama left it to Tad Devine, a senior Democratic operative.  As reported in The Hill:

Democratic strategist Tad Devine, an adviser to the Al Gore and John Kerry presidential campaigns, accused Mitt Romney’s campaign of invoking the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a recent ad.

Devine said Wednesday that he was “shocked” to see what he believed was imagery of an African-American church in an ad released Tuesday by Romney’s campaign team and airing in New Hampshire. The ad, Romney’s first of the campaign, is “clearly an attempt to bring back Rev. Wright and race,” Devine tweeted.

The charge is based on two images which float through the video so quickly you’ll miss them if you blink.  Again as reported by The Hill:

In the ad, a series of images including those of a foreclosed home and empty businesses flash by as text criticizes President Obama’s economic record. But at two points, the imagery cuts to well-dressed African-American women walking down a large hallway, and pans over a predominantly black audience.

“It appears to be a congregation of African-American people,” Devine told The Hill. “In the first scene there are no white people at all, in the second … it is all African Americans except possibly one person, [whose race] you can’t really tell.”

Devine said he believes these images were selected intentionally to invoke race and the controversy involving Wright, the president’s former pastor.

I never heard of Tad Devine before, but he is pathetic and disgusting in his role of race card player.

Note that Jeremiah Wright, who ought to be an issue as long as Obama is in politics, is not anywhere in the ad. It doesn’t mention him at all. Tad Devine is trying to use racial guilt to wall off Obama’s actual policy failures as an issue. He’s also signalling that any and all criticism of The One will be met with race-baiting and lies.

This is how they are going to play the game from here on out. It will be toxic and divisive, and dishonest from the word “go.” I hope we’re all ready for it.