Has Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, failed to live up to the dream of civil rights icon Martin Luther King? That’s one of several startling claims made in a new ad accusing Obama of “tacitly defending black racism before and since being elected.”
“The Obama administration has injected race into the presidential campaign,” the narrator intones at the beginning. “Obama Attorney General Eric Holder recently said, with no argument from the president, that their white critics are motivated by race.”
The voice in the commercial then turns Holder’s charge on its head: “Implying whites are too stupid to have honest disagreements with the president without being racist is, in and of itself, racist against whites.”
Both the ad and the registered super PAC behind it, FightBigotry.com, are the brainchild of longtime political consultant and opposition researcher Stephen Marks. In his autobiography “Confessions of a Political Hitman,” Marks described himself as “a strange-looking character, half librarian and half James Bond.”
“I think in 2008 a lot of people were willing to give Obama a pass on Jeremiah Wright because he seemed like a nice guy,” Marks told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I still think the president is a nice person.”
Marks argued that after Obama took office, his administration established a pattern of behaving in a racially polarizing manner, including Vice President Joe Biden’s recent remarks to a black audience that Republicans are going to put “y’all back in chains.”
“No one else has the stomach to bring up these issues,” Marks said. “Or the balls, I guess you could say.”
Marks, who narrates the ad himself, manages to pack all “these issues” into two minutes. He mentions the president’s criticism of Cambridge police after the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Marks quotes Obama as describing his own grandmother as a “typical white person” whose “racial slurs made him cringe.”
“But Jeremiah Wright’s far more racist rants never made him cringe?” Marks asks as footage of the infamous “Goddamn America” sermon by the president’s former pastor plays.
“In 2009, the Obama Justice Department dropped charges against the New Black Panthers just as they were about to be convicted of intimidating white voters,” Marks also says in the ad. “And they’re now calling for a race war, again with no objection from the president.”
Former Justice Department official J. Christian Adams, the author of the New York Times bestseller “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department,” said these are legitimate campaign issues.
“The Obama Presidency has been characterized by an unashamed racialist policy – whether trying to keep Abigail Fisher out of the University of Texas because she is white, or refusing to clean up the voter rolls under Motor Voter because it doesn’t ‘increase minority turnout,’ or dismissing the New Black Panther case because some defendants get breaks,” Adams told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an e-mail. “The administration thought they could do all this quietly, but millions of Americans have noticed.”
Those are the millions Marks plans to turn to get his ad on television. He said that unlike other super PACs, he is reaching out to small donors, like the ones who helped him get his 2000 ad tying Al Gore to Al Sharpton and his 2008 commercial portraying Obama as mocking the Bible on the airwaves. Marks wishes to target “blue-collar Democrats” in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Wisconsin.
Not everyone is a fan of Marks or his ads. The liberal group ThinkProgress condemned the spot as “obvious race-baiting” and “riddled with factual errors,” claiming Marks is merely “using an Orwellian name to inject racism into yet another campaign through smears.”
In 2008, the Obama campaign website Fight the Smears denounced another Marks production: “The video takes 5 sentences out of a 4,500-word speech Barack gave in 2006 completely out of context to stoke division and hatred.”
“This isn’t the biggest issue in the election,” Marks allowed. “But it’s one that should be discussed.”
“Attorney General Eric Holder called us cowards because we don’t talk enough about race,” Adams said in an e-mail. “So lets talk.”
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