NY Times’ Herbert Playing Race Again

If the New York Times’ Bob Herbert can find a racial conspiracy in anything involving a Republican, he will fish for it.

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Let’s poke a hole in Herbert’s premise, shall we?

If John McCain’s campaign created that same ad and instead of Paris and Britney, used the images of some troubled sistas (for the sake of this discussion, let’s say Halle Berry and Naomi Campbell), what would Bob Herbert be saying then? I’d be willing to bet he’d be outright accusing the McCain campaign of racism.

We know what the McCain campaign was inferring. No matter what narcissistic-behavior-challenged celebrities of any race or gender they chose to include in that ad, someone would take it the wrong way. The only reason the ad’s made waves is because the subject of that ad is black, period. It’s apparent that you can find a racial component in anything if you try hard enough.

Barack Obama uses every opportunity to make himself the victim of something. It would appear one in his media wing has adopted the same tactic. If this is to become a campaign about race, let’s go there. If Obama wants this to be a color-blind campaign, then he need to remind those sympathetic to him to stop interjecting race where is doesn’t belong.

The McCain campaign didn’t introduce Obama to Scarlett Johansson. The McCain campaign didn’t take the photos of white women practically ready to sexually assault Obama. The McCain campaign didn’t hire Amber Lee Ettinger to lipsync “I Got A Crush…On Obama”. The McCain campaign, or any Republican entity, has never made any sexual inference between Barack Obama and white women. Progressives have effectively done that, and the toothpaste won’t go back into the tube.

While I may have found another way to make the point if I were producing McCain’s commercials, Bob Herbert’s veiled attempt to make this a Willie Horton moment is lame. Let’s see if Herbert survives the next set of New York Times layoffs.

Of course if he doesn’t, that’ll be racist.