http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23577674#23582781

-- Modified on 3/11/2008 5:29:12 PM

The long knives, dirty tricks and totally unbelievable spin is just beginning to rev up.

The Clintons must feel like Custer about now. They think what worked for them against the Republicans is going to work again. Except this time, the press isn't going to be a willing participant and ally.

As Flounder said in Animal House, "Oh boy this is gonna be GREAT!!"


-- Modified on 3/11/2008 6:57:11 PM

Look, I'm mentioned in the news again!  Obama supporters are getting desperate trying to gin up white racist voter theories.  Headshrinkers call this "projection"?


Op-Ed Contributor
The Red Phone in Black and White


By ORLANDO PATTERSON
Published: March 11, 2008
Cambridge, Mass.




ON first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.” advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right — something that went beyond my disappointment that she had decided to go negative. Repeated watching of the ad on YouTube increased my unease. I realized that I had only too often in my study of America’s racial history seen images much like these, and the sentiments to which they allude.


I am not referring to the fact that the ad is unoriginal; as several others have noted, it mimics a similar ad made for Walter Mondale in his 1984 campaign for the Democratic nomination. What bothers me is the difference between this and the Mondale ad. The Mondale ad directly and unequivocally played on the issue of experience. The danger was that the red telephone might be answered by someone who was “unsure, unsteady, untested.” Why do I believe this? Because the phone and Mr. Mondale are the only images in the ad. Fair game in the normal politics of fear.


Not so this Clinton ad. To be sure, it states that something is “happening in the world” — although it never says what this is — and that Mrs. Clinton is better able to handle such danger because of her experience with foreign leaders. But every ad-maker, like every social linguist, knows that words are often the least important aspect of a message and are easily muted by powerful images.


I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.


The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino.


Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business suit at 3 a.m., answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency would be dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In my reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.


Did the message get through? Well, consider this: people who voted early went overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama; those who made up their minds during the three days after the ad was broadcast voted heavily for Mrs. Clinton.


For more than a century, American politicians have played on racial fears to divide the electorate and mobilize xenophobic parties. Blacks have been the “domestic enemy,” the eternal outsider within, who could always inspire unity among “we whites.” Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy was built on this premise, using coded language — “law and order,” “silent majority” — to destroy the alliance between blacks and white labor that had been the foundation of the Democratic Party, and to bring about the Republican ascendancy of the past several decades. The Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush used against Michael Dukakis in 1988 was a crude manifestation of this strategy — as was the racist attack used against John McCain’s daughter, who was adopted from Bangladesh, in the South Carolina Republican primary in 2000.


It is significant that the Clinton campaign used its telephone ad in Texas, where a Fox poll conducted Feb. 26 to 28 showed that whites favored Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton 47 percent to 44 percent, and not in Ohio, where she held a comfortable 16-point lead among whites. Exit polls on March 4 showed the ad’s effect in Texas: a 12-point swing to 56 percent of white votes toward Mrs. Clinton. It is striking, too, that during the same weekend the ad was broadcast, Mrs. Clinton refused to state unambiguously that Mr. Obama is a Christian and has never been a Muslim.


It is possible that what I saw in the ad is different from what Mrs. Clinton and her operatives saw and intended. But as I watched it again and again I could not help but think of the sorry pass to which we may have come — that someone could be trading on the darkened memories of a twisted past that Mr. Obama has struggled to transcend.



Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of “The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s ‘Racial’ Crisis.”

This kind of bullshit is so fucking offensive. Not everythimg is about race.

Orlando Patterson and his kind create more racists then they identify.

I don't dislike Obama because he's black. I distrust him because he is a naive, inexperienced, idealouge who would be horrible for this country. I dislike Orlando Patterson because he is a blithering idiot.

When people don't have anything intelligent to say and feel like they have to say something, they always end up making brain dead statements.

Tell me one thing, how come Obama always gets 85% to 90% of the black vote? Why and what is it?

Has any candidate black, white, latino, asian, red, yellow, purple, orange has ever gotten such block vote in the history of this country?

This what scares me. Instead of unifying, it is tearing social fabric apart and unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

"Tell me one thing, how come Obama always gets 85% to 90% of the black vote? Why and what is it?"


My theory is because the Blacks consistently vote 80 to 90% for Democrats ..Statistics have shown that the  White vote Obama is receiving {25 -60%} is from the more educated and richer Whites.. The Blacks have two choices Obama or Hillary ..If the smart Democrat  crackers are voting for Obama and the Blacks consistently vote Democrat it makes sense to me... From another angle, White Republicans are not the only group that can not stand Hillary..


-- Modified on 3/12/2008 5:21:34 AM

and I agree he is inexperienced, and not so much an accessory to the eye-deep shit we are in.

You regard that as a negative.  Why take a chance, you say?  We could have proven fuckups in the White House, so why take a chance that somebody might get it right?

Obama would fire more cons, and replace them with clowns, which is precisely what we need.  Right now, our problems are not muslims - it is politicians who can't invade the right country.  We are shooting ourselves in the foot, and you are hoping that our aim will get better.  

I am hoping they might cease fucking firing, even by mistake, or inability.

If we could elect Clint Eastwood, now I might go for THAT.   Because his image would make the righties happy, but actually I think he's a pretty sensible fellow, ie, crazy assed liberal who would actually look at the books.

"Orlando Patterson is a" delusional dipshit and an apparent racist of the worst kind. He should climb down off his soap box and bend over and let the whole country kick him in his fat ass. The bastard goes to through incredible gymnastics to reach a bullshit conclusion. The only thing he is correct about is that Clintonites know no boundaries.

His various leaps of "logic" are beyond me.

I used to think that Zin came up with the most ridiculous ideas. Quad has managed to exceed even the Zinmeister in absurdity. His ability to connect nonexistent dots is beyond me.

about now - so I'm guessing that somewhere around an 85 IQ might be all it would take to beat an electorate that re-elected Bush the Lesser.

If you accept his title as a mere hypothesis (as in MAYBE), then I really can't say his other comments are internally contradictory or patently insane, which would beat a lot of what gets posted here.

Patterson is a much more balanced and nuanced guy than this piece, which is clearly a reach as well as close to hysterical in tone, would ever lead anyone to believe.  How he get from Clinton's uninspired and not-too-origianl commercial to "Birth of a Nation" and almost a suggestion that Clintion is a Klanswoman is beyond me.  

Patterson does not strike me as an idiot, but here he's clearly  blithering.