Obama’s ‘not one of us’ attack on Romney echoes racial code — WaPo
“Mitt Romney. Not one of us.”
That’s the tag line to a tough new ad the Obama campaign is airing in Ohio. But it is one that, ironically, echoes a slogan that has been used as a racial code over the last half century or more.
The context of the ad is very different from the one in which the phrase “one of us” was used to divide the country along racial lines, but Conservative commentators quickly seized on it.
Obama’s critics said the fact that he would use such loaded language in the hard-fought race to win Ohio shows how much he has changed from the politician whose famous “one America” speech at the 2004 Democratic convention denounced “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.”
Charles C.W. Cooke wrote in National Review’s The Corner blog that Obama was “moving a long way from the famous — if vacuous — ‘no red states or blue states’ speech.”
“Had Romney pulled this on him, we’d need a special two-hour episode of ‘Hardball’ to deal with the dog-whistle implications,”added Rick Moran on the American Thinker blog.
