A bit of a stretcher

Harvard professor Orlando Patterson, who has spent his "life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery", thinks he sees a racist subtext in Clinton's "3 a.m." or "red telephone" ad:

...[W]hen 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.

Oh, come on. That this was an ad attacking Obama's alleged inexperience is beyond any reasonable doubt; you would have to be trying very, very hard to see any kind of racial component to it. His interpretation of the ad is, to begin with, tenuous at best: the generic images of canonically white, blonde children imply the threat of the dangerous black man, he says. But then he seriously undermines even this by pointing out that some of the children don't even look white at all--to him they "seem vaguely Latino". So it would appear that, for Patterson, any generic image of a non-black child whatsoever automatically implies the racist concept of the threatening black man.

Patterson sets the bar for racism so low that any serious accusation of racism on the part of Clinton becomes absurd. By so dramatically and loudly trumpeting such a baseless charge of racism, he cheapens the public discourse on race and does a disservice to those with legitimate protests against real racism.