This ad is race-baiting:
Call me naive, but this ad isn’t:
The reason I believe that McCain actually is trying to make a point about celebrity and not trying to insinuate miscegenation (which granted does describe Obama’s parents, though there is nothing wrong with miscegenation), is that when you are looking for the biggest celebrities in the media sphere, they are almost invariably white women. Sure, McCain could have used the duo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but their celebrity has a fairly positive connotation.
Though I think the argument McCain is making is stupid (if McCain thinks being disliked is better than being liked, he truly is running for Bush’s third term), if he is going to go with this line of attack, going after Obama’s popularity, he obviously will need to find negative connotations of popularity, and Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are certainly suitable to this.
So McCain is an idiotic douchebag, but he isn’t a racist. So is Obama’s response, claiming that he will be attacked for having a funny name and not looking like past Presidents, playing the race card? To the degree that it is, it is merited. There is little doubt that Obama has been attacked early and often in ways that imply he is foreign, potentially Muslim (HE ISN’T), and generally too risky. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense for Obama to take this response back up in light of the recent ads, but he certainly is justified in the response more generally.
