318 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyWhite House, where Senator Clinton was shown answering an emergency telephone call at 3 AM in
what was obviously some sort of national security emergency. The suggested theme was that
Senator Clinton was prepared for the awesome responsibilities of the presidency, specifically in the
areas of national defense and crisis management. The Obama campaign immediately screamed that
this was a highly negative ad – despite the obvious fact that Obama’s name was not even
mentioned. Not content with this, the Obominables trotted out the Harvard sociology professor
Orlando Patterson, a black man in a postmodernist Mao suit, who proclaimed that he had discovered
a racist and nefarious subliminal message in Clinton’s ad – the emergency implied was in his view a
prowler or thief trying to break into the house, and, given, the southern state where the ad was being
shown, that thief or prowler could only be a black man! It was a salto mortale of the worst kind,
buttressed by the kind of impressionistic deconstructionism pioneered by the late Jacques Derrida.
Patterson’s charges were absurd, and he was exposing himself as an opportunist and charlatan. This
amazing outburst was answered by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who was emerging as one of
the most incisive critics of the Obama campaign’s duplicitous hypocrisy on the race issue. Wilentz
commented: ‘Reading Orlando Patterson’s op-ed in the New York Times, “The Red Phone in Black
and White,” is a depressing experience. Not only does the piece scurrilously accuse Hillary
Clinton’s campaign of cutting an ad that borrows from the filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s glorification
of the Ku Klux Klan. Not only is this attack based on a Clinton advertisement about national
security, not domestic policy (let alone race), that required a singularly tortured and biased “close
reading” by Patterson to reach its conclusions. What is truly depressing is that the essay fits what
has become a troubling and familiar pattern by the Obama campaign and its fervent supporters to
inject racial politics on the eve of yet another Democratic primary in a Southern state, in this case
Mississippi, where African-American voters are expected to vote in large numbers. [...] In Texas,
Ohio, and Rhode Island on March 4, as earlier in New Hampshire, the Obama campaign did not
achieve the knock-out blow it expected and predicted. Indeed, just before those primaries and since,
Obama’s camp started to receive serious criticism and scrutiny for the first time, over the
candidate’s connections to indicted Chicago fixer Tony Rezko, and over the amateurish and
revealing actions of senior advisers Austan Goolsbee, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. The
campaign has turned to double-talk and to stonewalling the press. And once again, it has lashed out
by playing racial politics while accusing the Clinton campaign of playing the very same game.
Interpreting the Clinton 3 A.M. phone ad on preparedness and national security as a hidden appeal
to white racism takes a remarkable bit of bad faith on the part of Professor Patterson. But the bad
faith is not restricted to him alone. Earlier in the campaign, in speeches to black audiences, Obama
mouthed lines generally believed to come from Malcolm X about how African-Americans were
being “bamboozled” and “hoodwinked” by white oppressors and Uncle Toms – except that the lines
were not actually Malcolm’s but were scripted for Denzel Washington playing Malcolm X in Spike
Lee’s movie. Now, in Mississippi, Obama is talking about blacks being bamboozled and
hoodwinked again. Then, after Obama conceded that Clinton had nothing to do with the ridiculous
posting on the disreputable Drudge Report of a picture of Obama in ceremonial Somali dress –
supposedly an appeal to racial and religious fears – he now is telling the voters of Mississippi that
in fact she was responsible for the photo’s appearance, and that she did it in order to scare people –
a charge he well knows to be untrue. In the televised debate in Ohio on February 26, Obama said
that “I take Senator Clinton at her word that she knew nothing about the photo. So I think that’s
something that we can set aside.” But on March 10 in Jackson, Mississippi, he declared, “When in
the midst of a campaign you decide to throw the kitchen sink at your opponent because you’re
behind, and your campaign starts leaking photographs of me when I’m traveling overseas wearing
the native clothes of those folks to make people afraid ... that’s not real change” The flip-flopping