We're covering the "darkened" picture of Obama controversy. Here's the original Daily Kos entry accusing the Hillary campaign of darkening Obama's face in an ad as some sort of racist plot to make him appear blacker and, therefore, presumably more "threatening."
Here's the original footage of Obama the ad used, from the debate in question.
Here's Hillary's ad, which we'll all concede does make him darker.
But, as Allah notes, he's mostly greyer and washed out, not real menacing. It's also a negative ad, in which all the frames are a little greyer and foreboding than they would normally be, not just the clip of Obama.
The Clinton campaign first claimed that the ad was darkened as part of a "saturation-desaturation" process, and:
Asked for comment, Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson said, "this is a bogus assertion. Ads look different based on software, screens, computers, television, etc."Little Green Footballs supports that assertion with a technical explanation.
Later, they claimed the ad is not Hillary's, which seems very silly given that it's available on her web site and on her YouTube site.
He said on Fox News that he had spoken with the campaigns chief ad-maker, Mandy Grunwald, who emphatically denied the ad on DailyKos was theirs."We don't know what is up there, but it is not our ad," Mr Carson said.
So, anyway, my feeling was that this was another raaaaacist creation of the lefty blogs, ala the drums in the back of that Corker radio ad in Tennessee in '06, but what's with Hillary's campaign saying two different things about the ad? It seems reasonable to assume the difference in color is due to technology and the natural tendency to make a negative ad darker, but the response from the Hillary campaign is weird.
The whole thing's just a preview of the race-baiting wonderland we're headed into if Obama's the Democratic nominee. Listen, some things need to be called out. I think the superfluous middle-name usage, for instance, is designed to send a message and should be cut out. I understand that some things are out of bounds, but liberals have been demagoguing race for so long, they can't tell the difference between real racism and coded messages that are just figments of their fevered, guilty imaginations (or, deliberate fabrications of their cynical imaginations, even).
Let us not forget, either, that the Democratic Party has been accused, with some credibility, of darkening ads of Republican Bobby Jindal in 2003 to make him less palatable to Northern Louisia voters. And, even Mr. Post-Racial himself is not wholly without blame.
So, let's play careful with the raaaaaacism accusations. It just seems to me, in this case, team Hillary would have much more to lose than to gain by darkening Obama by a few shades.
Oh, and we're talking about Huffington Post having nasty comments on it.