President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign featured the word “Redskins” in a campaign video, despite his government’s recent decision that the name is too divisive to even be trademarked on T-shirts.
BarackObama.com posted a September 2008 video on its Youtube channel entitled “Lorenzo Alexander and Leigh Torrence for Obama.” The video, featuring players Alexander and Torrence offering their support for the Democrat at a voter-registration event, identified the players in on-screen text as being affiliated with the “Washington Redskins” and featured footage of the “Redskins” name on Alexander’s jersey.
Alexander explained that, “We got everybody on the team to get together and sign up and register got all of the players in the Redskins locker room to register to vote for Obama.”
The question emerges: Why was Barack Obama’s campaign using such hateful, despicable rhetoric in a campaign advertisement? Why was the future president proud of the fact that men were wearing such a racist word on their shirts as they helped register potential Obama voters? Was that the point? Was Obama using the symbology of racism to inculcate anti-Indian sentiment among voters, creating a jingoistic effect that would galvanize football fans to the polls in a frothing wave of cowboys-vs.-Indians vigor?
Sound plausible? No? Well, that’s what you would have heard from the left if McCain had done it.
P.S.: In 2004, the year Obama was first elected to the Senate, a poll directed by a former New York Times reporter found that 90 percent of American Indians were not offended by the Redskins name.