What would make the ad illegitimate?
“My favorite ad of the campaign was as simple as it could be,” Davis said. “And it started out something like, ‘Long before the world knew of John McCain or Barack Obama, one of them spent five years in a hellhole because he refused early release to honor his fellow prisoners, while the other one wouldn’t walk out of a church after 20 years of the guy spewing hatred towards America.’ And the last line was, ‘Character matters, especially when no one is listening.’” The ad never ran, however, because McCain ruled the topic of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the preacher of Obama’s Chicago church, out of bounds shortly after he locked up the Republican nomination.
…
Davis says that concern about race played a major role in the entire aesthetic of McCain’s ads. The photographs of Obama that the ads used, for instance, which often showed Obama elongated and smiling, were carefully selected, he recalls. “We chose them with only one thing in mind, and that is to not make them bad pictures because bad pictures would be seen as racist,” Davis says. “How many shots in their ads did they use a John McCain [photo] looking decent and smiling?” He says the campaign also agonized over the music in the ads, paying special care not to play drum-heavy tracks that could be seen as an African tribal reference. “We were held to a totally different standard,” he says.
Nevertheless, the McCain campaign was unable to escape the charge that it was playing the race card.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1861831,00.html
Of course he couldn’t.
This is one of several of my fears of having Obama as president: the media being too afraid of receiving accusations of racism when reporting Obama’s bad choices, corruptions, and discriminatory policies. I think the democrats went out of there way this time to exploit white guilt and male guilt in choosing candidates that couldn’t be openly criticized for their failings. At some upcoming election they’ll probably run a gay black female in a wheel-chair and dare anyone to criticize her or not vote for her.