Race enters stage in US presidential campaign
PORTIONS of a video featuring Barack Obama speaking to a conference of black clergy in 2007, aired on Tuesday night, injected the issue of race into the campaign on the eve of the president’s first televised debate against Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
In the June 2007 video, shown by Fox News, Mr Obama faults former president George Bush for not doing enough to calm racial tensions in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and calls his predecessor’s administration “colour blind in its incompetence”. Mr Obama, then a US senator from Illinois, also refers to his relationship with his controversial former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.
Parts of the speech have been online since 2007. The full video was promoted last night by Fox talk-show host Sean Hannity and the Daily Caller website, both Obama critics. The video was replayed as Mr Obama leads Mr Romney in most national polls and in surveys of voters in the 10 or so states that both campaigns are focused on as crucial to deciding the November 6 election.
Supporters of both campaigns have mined old recordings to tarnish their rivals. Mother Jones, the magazine that published a secretly recorded tape of Mr Romney’s May remarks to donors, released another video last month of Mr Romney from 1985. In it, he characterised Bain Capital, the Boston-based privateequity firm he co-founded, as a partnership created to invest in companies, help manage them and “harvest them at a significant profit”.
Linking the first black US president to Mr Wright was a tactic rejected by Mr Romney in May after Republican strategists proposed it.
The New York Times reported at the time that Republican strategist Fred Davis had drafted the plan for a super-political action committee backed by billionaire Joe Ricketts, the founder of what is now TD Ameritrade, to run ads featuring Mr Wright, whose racially incendiary sermons became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign.
“I repudiate that effort,” Mr Romney told reporters in May in Jacksonville, Florida. “I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America.”
Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, said last night the campaign had not seen the video and “did not have any involvement” in its promotion.
The Obama campaign called it a “transparent” attempt to distract from the issues in the campaign.
“If the Romney campaign believes that Americans will accept these desperate attacks … in place of specific plans for the middle class, it’s they who are in for a surprise,” Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in an e-mail.
On his programme Mr Hannity said the video shows “some of the most divisive class warfare and racially charged rhetoric ever used by Barack Obama”. Coverage of the June 2007 remarks that Mr Obama delivered to 8,000 people at Hampton University in Virginia focused on his frank discussion of race. Bloomberg