John McCain’s new ad, “Advice,” attempts to tie Obama to Franklin Raines, who ran Fannie Mae.
Raines and Obama are somewhat tenous connection (he took phone calls from the Obama campaign). And Karen Tumulty of Time says the decision to tie Obama to Raines in this ad — and not, say, Jim Johnson, the disgraced former chief of subprime lender Countrywide Financial who actually was an adviser to Obama — is not an accident.
Instead, it relies on a fleeting and tenuous reference in a Washington Post Style section story to suggest that Obama’s principal economic adviser is former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines. Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.
And the image of the victim doesn’t seem accidental either, given the fact that older white women are a key swing constituency in this election.
The McCain camp didn’t see Johnson’s sheisty-ness and proximity to Obama as a big enough liability. No, what they really needed was someone sheisty and black, even if that person barely knew Obama.
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