Who is using the race card in this presidential campaign again? Is it Republicans? Is it Governor Romney? Nope. You got it, it’s the left as we see from a former president of Media Matters and some of his Old Media pals who have created a video saying that Mitt Romney is too white to appeal to black voters.
The creators of the video are music publisher Cliff Chenfeld, former Media Matters president Eric Burns, former AOL chief Michael Wolfson, and a former New York Times journalist named Andrew Zipern.
Released before Romney speaks to a gathering of the NAACP, the video present a fictionalized meeting of Romney’s advisers. The script throws in obligatory insults to Mormonism, claims that Republicans want to disenfranchise blacks and young voters, assumes Republicans are perpetrating racism against Obama, and, last but not least, insinuating birtherism despite the fact that Romney has never agreed with the birth certificate conspiracies.
The video begins with a faux adviser who is presented as the guy that created the Willie Horton ads in 1988 for George H.W. Bush. This character tries to advise the Governor how to talk to the NAACP. But Romney is so white, he says, that he makes “Wonder Bread look like pumpernickel.”
“Let me be clear about something, this is not about the blacks. Now Governor, you are a very nice man, you are a very nice white man. You are so white, you are extremely white,” the pretend Romney adviser says.
The fake adviser then goes on to encourage Romney to “go on out there and get all Mormon, Martin Luther King on them, you’re going to be great.”
The “satirical” video ends with a young black man coming into the room, the fake Romney advisers looking scared of him, and a hand representing the Governor waving hello in a hesitant manner, with all in the room obviously uncomfortable with an up-close-and-personal meeting with a live black man.
The whole video employs every white-guys-fear-blacks stereotype you can think of.
Yep, there’s that new tone Obama and his supporters said we’d get back in 2008.