The Blog @ Spolitics

Media Hack Openly Campaigns for Obama

Andrea Mitchell claims that when Barack Obama said the McCain campaign was going to make voters afraid of him because he has a funny name and doesn’t look like the Presidents on our dollar bills, that he was just being self-deprecating and wasn’t making a racial statement. She argues that the McCain camp are the ones who injected race into the campaign by interpreting his remarks as racial and overreacting to them. (Hat Tip: Newsbusters).

Mitchell also comically argues that, instead of comparing Obama to Britney and Paris, the McCain camp should have compared him to world leaders who have contributed to political or human rights issues (skip ahead to 4:30). And there you have it: according to Mitchell, in order to be acceptable, McCain’s campaign commercials have to be pro-Obama — any criticism of him is apparently out of bounds.

Allow us to clue Mitchell in: the reaction from Rick Davis was heated because Obama was accusing the McCain camp of racially motivated attacks. It was baseless and incendiary and they were right to respond.

But what’s really interesting about Mitchell’s comments is that they are in line with the campaign’s talking points as expressed by Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod. (Axelrod appears at 2:43 — Hat Tip: Hot Air.)

For the record, Axelrod is wrong about how the media reported Obama’s remark. Here’s what ABC’s Jake Tapper had to say about it:

I’ve seen racism in campaigns before — I’ve seen it against Obama in this campaign (more from Democrats than Republicans, at this point, I might add) and I’ve seen it against McCain in South Carolina in 2000, when his adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was alleged, by the charming friends and allies of then-Gov. George W. Bush, to have been a McCain love-child with an African-American woman.

What I have not seen is it come from McCain or his campaign in such a way to merit the language Obama used today. Pretty inflammatory.