Sarah Palin has reacted to an Obama campaign ad in which she is featured in exactly the way you would expect.
On Facebook Monday night, Palin slammed Obama for, she claimed, twisting her words in a hard-hitting new campaign ad that seeks to raise money off the new conservative obsession with Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell.
Here’s the ad:
And here’s the lines from Palin as transcribed by TPM (ellipses indicate edits):
Barack Obama I think has never been seen in the conventional, traditional way of we who would describe a man of valor. … And his profession as a community organizer — what went into his thinking was this philosophy of radicalism … he is bringing us back, Sean, to days that — you can hearken back to days before the Civil War … What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin. Why are we allowing our country to move backwards?
The ad splices together several quotes from Palin’s recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where she discussed Bell and other topics (like the million-dollar check an Obama-supporting super PAC took from Bill Maher). Palin suggests the splices are unfair, but doubles down on the right-wing claim that a clip of Obama hugging Bell proves Obama is a dangerous anti-white radical. From her post:
This latest ad is quite odd, but also quite telling. It shows that our President sure seems fearful of discussing the economy, energy prices, and all the other problems people need addressed. And intended or not, now that his ad opens up the discussion of Barack Obama’s radical past associations and the radical philosophy that shaped his ideas about his promised “fundamental transformation” of our country, I welcome the media to join ordinary Americans in finally vetting Barack Obama. The media failed to do so in 2008 to the detriment of us all. Maybe this time around they can do their job.
They might start by noting the President’s heavily edited attack ad.
Palin links to this Breitbart.com story that also calls the Palin quotes “heavily edited.”
The post was updated to include TPM’s transcription of the Obama ad.
But the money quote in the ad — the one in which she invokes the Civil War — is actually more damning (in terms of the claims the Obama campaign says Palin is making) in full than in the edited version. Here’s the transcript:
He is bringing us back to days, you can hearken back to days before the Civil War, when unfortunately too many Americans mistakenly believed that not all men were created equal. And it was the Civil War that began the codification of the truth that here in America, yes we are equal, and we all have equal opportunities, not based on the color of your skin, you have equal opportunity to work hard and to succeed and to embrace God-given opportunities to develop resources and work extremely hard and as I say, to succeed. Now, it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand the gravity of that mistake that took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin. Why are we allowing our country to move backwards instead of moving forward with that understanding that as our charters of liberty spell out for us, we are all created equally?
Palin has been beating the drum about Obama’s supposed radicalism for years. She’s going down that road again with the Bell video, which other conservatives agree makes the case Palin and others have been arguing for years — that Obama is actually biased against whites.
