The Obama re-election campaign has released an internet ad targeting Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, and Breitbart.com. Coming up short in the fundraising department and under fire for President Obama’s longtime association with the radical ideas of Professor Derrick Bell, the Obama campaign video features the McCain/Palin logo, and claims that right-wingers are dog-whistling racism.
The video opens with words flying in, white on blue, with the trademark McCain/Palin yellow stripe. “MORE THAN FOUR YEARS LATER,” the ad proclaims, “SARAH PALIN AND THE FAR RIGHT SAY PRESIDENT OBAMA WILL BRING BACK RACIAL DISCRIMINATION … AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE.”
The video then cuts to Palin on Hannity stating, “Barack Obama has never been seen in the conventional, traditional way of we who would describe a man of valor … And his profession as a community organizer, what went into his thinking was this philosophy of radicalism … He is bringing us back, Sean, you can hearken back to days before the Civil War … What Barack Obama seems to want to do is to go back to those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin, why are we allowing our country to move backwards?”
“THESE ATTACKS ARE WRONG AND DANGEROUS,” the ad shouts. “IF YOU’RE TIRED OF IT, DO SOMETHING. DONATE TO THE TWO TERM FUND.”
Let’s parse this for a second. Palin was talking about the Derrick Bell story when she said all of this. Here’s the actual transcript, unspliced together by the Obama campaign. Here’s the “man of valor” clip – she was clearly talking about how Obama was accepting campaign cash from Bill Maher, a man who had called Palin a “c—“:
I don’t know how anyone can sit in the audience of a commentator like Bill Maher and chuckle and laugh and think that that’s entertaining. I think it’s disgusting and it’s dirty money that he has now provided Barack Obama’s campaign, and I don’t know how Barack Obama can sleep at night if he really thinks about Sasha and Malia and the treatment of some women today, how he can accept that dirty money. And granted Barack Obama has never been, I think, seen in the conventional, traditional way of we who would describe a man of valor, so it shouldn’t surprise us that Barack Obama would accept that dirty money and try to get re-elected with it. But I think it does not bode well for our president’s character to not speak out against that dirty money.
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