A web ad released by a new superPAC suggests that President Obama's administration has quietly accepted and even promoted racism against white people.
The ad, by a superPAC called FightBigotry, said that the president has gotten a free pass for "his disturbing, yet crystal-clear pattern of tacitly defending black racism against white folks before and since being elected president."
According to ThinkProgress, the group was founded by Stephen Marks, a Republican media consultant and opposition researcher, who penned a 2008 book called "Confessions of a Political Hitman."
The ad goes on to assert that Attorney General Eric Holder said that the administration's critics are motivated by race. "Implying that whites are too stupid to have honest disagreements with the president without being racist is, in and of itself, racist against whites," the narrator says.
The ad attributes that assertion to a December 2011 New York Times article where Holder told a reporter that a few critics were "conflating things, conveniently leaving stuff out, construing thins to make it seem not quite what it was."
Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme segment” — were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African American.”
SuperPACs are not affiliated with campaigns and are forbidden by law from coordinating with them, although they may support a particular candidate. Since a candidate does not have to say that he or she approves a given message from a superPAC, it allows superPACs to be more aggressive while not sullying the reputation of the candidate who might benefit from the negative ad.
FightBigotry edits the famous speech on race that the then-Senator Obama gave at the height of the controversy surrounding his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In it, Obama discussed how race had shaped him and the role it continued to play in American life. Obama said that his maternal grandmother, who is white, harbored casually racist views even though she loved him.
However, the ad is edited so that it appears that President Obama is dismissing his grandmother as "a typical white person," and that he was unbothered by Wright's statements, although Obama explicitly condemned the comments in the speech.
"Mr. President, you ran as the candidate of change," the ad's narrator says in conclusion. "But one thing has not changed—your tacit defense of racism against white folks, despite receiving nearly half the white vote to win the presidency."
Obama won the White House in 2008 with just 43 percent of the white vote, the smallest share ever garnered by a winning presidential candidate in U.S. history.