PrintApril 9, 2008
'Get me more white people'
Do you recall those internet rumors that some outlets were darkening the tone of Barack Obama in order so send a subliminal message ?
Remember the use of the race card by the Obama campaign to disparage questions and criticism of him by suggesting that it was racially motivated (the use of the race card to shut down debate and opposition from the Hillary Clinton campaign was noted by no less than the liberal The New Republic).
Now news has been emerging that barack Obama and his phalanx of image makers has been busy at work trying to project an image that he has legions of white supporters .The Selling of the President by Joe McGinnis comes to mind with that strategy..
Will America have buyer's remorse?
From the account in Carnegie Mellon's paper, the Tartan, of a Michelle Obama event in Pittsburgh:
While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama.The Tartan’s correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s going to look so pretty, though.”
“I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’ ” said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it would be so outright.”
I'm not sure there's any real reason for outrage here; every campaign, at least implicitly, includes race in the staging of events like this -- even a campaign whose supporters chant "race doesn't matter."
But they don't usually get caught doing it this explicitly.
But they don't usually get caught doing it this explicitly.
And (if you didn't pick it up from the bowling) it does give you a sense of the community Obama's trying to reach in Pennsylvania: whitefolks.
Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland has noticed the same thing:
CJR's Beckman estimated that 85% of the audience at the rally were black.This began to register with me when I tuned in to Obama's soaring, magnificent victory speech in South Carolina on Jan. 26. His mastery was impressive. And so was that of his image managers, I gradually concluded.I marveled at the sea of white faces nodding approvingly or cheering wildly behind Obama. Then I realized that only a sprinkling of the black voters and volunteers who helped power the candidate's victory in my home state had made it onto the platform seats behind Obama, in range of the national eye.
Was it possible these voters had not come to celebrate their victory? Hardly. Reporters in the hall saw Obama campaign workers usher photogenic white families toward the platform as they entered. The scene they composed was an effective, calculated rebuttal of the Clintons' effort to portray Obama as a black candidate whose victory depended on race -- a way of killing "this possible racial narrative before it could be born," as Gal Beckerman wrote in a perceptive dispatch on the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk blog.
