Photo credits: Associated Press File PhotoIn an article in The New Republic today, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz explains how Barack Obama played the race card and blamed Hillary Clinton. In the process, Wilentz addresses an issue related to one that I raised in a previous post, that is “the gap between Senator Barack Obama's promises of a pure, soul-cleansing ‘new’ politics and the calculated, deeply dishonest conduct of his actually-existing campaign. But it remains to be seen whether the latest ploy by the Obama camp--over allegations about the circulation of a photograph of Obama in ceremonial Somali dress--will be exposed by the press as the manipulative illusion that it is.”
Noting the media’s complicity in the Obama campaign’s destructive tactics, Wilentz states, “This development is the latest sad commentary on the malign power of the press, hyping its own favorites and tearing down those it dislikes, to create pseudo-scandals of the sort that hounded Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. It is also a commentary on how race can make American politics go haywire. Above all, it is a commentary on the cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama's supposedly uplifting campaign.”
Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton).
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