Speaking of radioactive politics, conservatives lately have been dipping their toes into old controversies lately. Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) remarked in a speech last weekend about President Obama, “in his heart, he’s not an American.” Coffman apologized once tape surfaced of the speech. The folks at the late Andrew Breitbart’s site have the top link on the Drudge Report right now with something about a 21-year-old booklet that says President Obama was born in Kenya. (Nice that the article is prefaced by a lengthy We’re Not Birthers!™ disclaimer.)
The more hilarious example is a new “birther” film, “Dreams From My Real Father” (get it?), which among its very outlandish assertions, claims that President Obama’s father was a Communist…from Hawaii. (You can imagine why that’s confounding the “birthers” out there who kick it old school, and claim that he’s from Kenya.)
Conservatives toy with this stuff all the time. But this morning, anyone picking up (or logging into) the New York Times‘ front page learned that a super-PAC called Character Matters (really) backing presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney was gearing up an effort to get serious using an even older bogeyman: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Timed to upend the Democratic National Convention in September, the plan would “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do,” the strategists wrote…
“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.
The use of Wright by conservatives in the 2008 campaign is well-remembered as rather overt race-baiting, and this also fits that bill. (Wright didn’t help matters when he revealed himself as what I deemed at the time as a “crab in the barrel,” turning on the President first with his cartoonish Press Club appearance in April of 2008.)
The juiciest and most hilarious part of the Times piece, bar none, was this:
The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”
Really? They needed a conservative black spokesman, and an “extremely literate” one at that? The jokes write themselves, particularly when they come to phrases like “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln,” which sounds like more of a compliment.
To say the least, the reaction to this has been swift. Republicans were quick to respond negatively, including Romney. As Greg Sargent notes, the fact that Romney himself employed the Rev. Wright bogeyman in a February radio interview didn’t stop his campaign today from coming out with a statement that read, in part:









