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ORLANDO PATTERSON
The New York Times
March 11, 2008
ON first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.”
advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was
not quite right — something that went beyond my disappointment that
she had decided to go negative. Repeated watching of the ad on
YouTube increased my unease. I realized that I had only too often in
my study of America’s racial history seen images much like these,
and the sentiments to which they allude.
I am not referring to the fact that the ad is unoriginal; as several
others have noted, it mimics a similar ad made for Walter Mondale in
his 1984 campaign for the Democratic nomination. What bothers me is
the difference between this and the Mondale ad. The Mondale ad
directly and unequivocally played on the issue of experience. The
danger was that the red telephone might be answered by someone who
was “unsure, unsteady, untested.” Why do I believe this? Because the
phone and Mr. Mondale are the only images in the ad. Fair game in
the normal politics of fear.
Not so this Clinton ad. To be sure, it states that something is
“happening in the world” — although it never says what this is — and
that Mrs. Clinton is better able to handle such danger because of
her experience with foreign leaders. But every ad-maker, like every
social linguist, knows that words are often the least important
aspect of a message and are easily muted by powerful images.
I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and
slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent
sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of
mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I
couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the
racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its
portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society.
The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the
person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could
not be trusted to protect us from this threat.
The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including
images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the
danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera
first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in
another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them
ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black — both, in
fact, seem vaguely Latino.
Finally, Hillary Clinton appears, wearing a business suit at 3 a.m.,
answering the phone. The message: our loved ones are in grave danger
and only Mrs. Clinton can save them. An Obama presidency would be
dangerous — and not just because of his lack of experience. In my
reading, the ad, in the insidious language of symbolism, says that
Mr. Obama is himself the danger, the outsider within.
Did the message get through? Well, consider this: people who voted
early went overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama; those who made up their
minds during the three days after the ad was broadcast voted heavily
for Mrs. Clinton.
For more than a century, American politicians have played on racial
fears to divide the electorate and mobilize xenophobic parties.
Blacks have been the “domestic enemy,” the eternal outsider within,
who could always inspire unity among “we whites.” Richard Nixon’s
Southern strategy was built on this premise, using coded language —
“law and order,” “silent majority” — to destroy the alliance between
blacks and white labor that had been the foundation of the
Democratic Party, and to bring about the Republican ascendancy of
the past several decades. The Willie Horton ad that George H. W.
Bush used against Michael Dukakis in 1988 was a crude manifestation
of this strategy — as was the racist attack used against John
McCain’s daughter, who was adopted from Bangladesh, in the South
Carolina Republican primary in 2000.
It is significant that the Clinton campaign used its telephone ad in
Texas, where a Fox poll conducted Feb. 26 to 28 showed that whites
favored Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton 47 percent to 44 percent, and
not in Ohio, where she held a comfortable 16-point lead among
whites. Exit polls on March 4 showed the ad’s effect in Texas: a
12-point swing to 56 percent of white votes toward Mrs. Clinton. It
is striking, too, that during the same weekend the ad was broadcast,
Mrs. Clinton refused to state unambiguously that Mr. Obama is a
Christian and has never been a Muslim.
It is possible that what I saw in the ad is different from what Mrs.
Clinton and her operatives saw and intended. But as I watched it
again and again I could not help but think of the sorry pass to
which we may have come — that someone could be trading on the
darkened memories of a twisted past that Mr. Obama has struggled to
transcend.
Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the
author of “The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in
America’s ‘Racial’ Crisis.”
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