When Jeb Bush’s super PAC sent out a direct-mail piece to thousands of Iowa Republicans, it was largely ignored at the national level. But In recent days, a question emerged: what’s with his left hand?
The Jeb Bush super PAC Right to Rise sent a mailer to more than 85,000 Iowa voters, but something is a bit off in the photo of the group’s favorite 2016 presidential nominee. […]Liberal news blog ThinkProgress accused the group of superimposing the GOP nominee’s head onto the body of a black man, while TIME pointed out the background in the picture is actually a stock photo of Cedar Rapids.
It wasn’t long before the Republican candidate’s rivals started to notice. “Jeb Bush has a Photoshopped photo for an ad which gives him a black left hand and much different looking body,” Donald Trump mocked. “Jeb just can’t get it right!”
The trouble may be easy to miss, at least at first, but the image from the front of the mailer appears above. Pay particular attention to the former governor’s left hand, towards the bottom middle.
While something appears off, the allegations don’t seem quite right, either. If Team Jeb intended to superimpose the candidate’s head onto someone else’s body, why change the skin tone of one hand and not the other?
The answer became clear when Paul Lindsay, who works for Bush’s super PAC, published the original photo that was used for the mailing. Note, the candidate was superimposed against a Cedar Rapids background, but it’s actually Bush’s body — and both of his hands.
In this case, his left hand appears to have a darker tone, not because it belongs to someone else, but because of the lighting in the original.
The ridicule, in other words, was misplaced. As New York magazine put it, “[I]nstead of a bi-racial Photoshop fail, it was just a plain old photo-selection, poor-digital-retouching fail.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."