UK: Why using Wright against Obama is a racial smear

The Guardian

The Wright stuff: Obama's pastor and the Ricketts smear

Republicans are rightly shamed by a Super Pac ad plan to tag Obama as a black radical. The irony is his very lack of radicalism

By Ana Marie Cox

Nebraska has already supplied the right with a billionaire boogeyman: Warren Buffet, hero of the secretarial pool and worldly philanthropist.

Now, the left has a Husker to hate: Joe Ricketts, the man for whom a group of Republican troublemakers dreamed up the perhaps-intentionally hilarious, to-be-sure-intentionally shocking "Plan to Defeat Barack Hussein Obama". The document's deadpan staccato phrasing has the punctuation-agnostic urgency and livid prose of a "Mission: Impossible" assignment memo (or an Austin Powers trailer). "The Plan. An Overview," reads the titular section:

"A five-minute unusually unique" – sic! – "film bringing his tutorship beneath Reverend Wright and others to the forefront of popular discourse … We start by raising an eyebrow. Teasers, hints of dark clouds to come. Buying print space, newspaper ads, kiosks at the airport, around the convention and skies overhead … A shocking message, the perfect radical messenger to attract attention, heavy press, two solid weeks of national television, heavy social media and a long-lasting web presence to run through the election."

I don't know why they would consider wasting all that time and money on ad buys when the message is so shocking it doesn't even always need verbs. Then again, the whole document is really a smoke-screen for an attack that is really only one word long. I'll give you a hint. The creators of the plan describe Obama as the "metrosexual black Abe Lincoln": which one of those terms, historically, is seen as a negative?

For the rest of the article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/18/wright-stuff-obama-pastor-ricketts-smear