Stressing the Obama "Blackening Campaign"

John McCain's recent advertising buy is being referred to as the "Celeb/Blackening campaign" by Josh Marshall at TPM.

The reference, of course, is to McCain's hard-hitting campaign spot that compares Barack Obama to a media celebrity, which includes quick images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

The media controversy's been the rage this week, with Paris Hilton jumping into the fray as a "hot" third-party alternative.

But I'm particular intrigued by the mind-bending contortions among Obama supporters. Marshall discusses the Obama's Celeb fallout as if it's McCain who's been damaged, which is not how most observers have evaluated recent changes in the campaign. Here's Marshall's stressful contortions:

On the subject of this new McCain ad sleazing Obama, in our editorial meeting this morning I told Greg that I was interested in what more we could find out about the disjuncture, if there is one, between the public reception of this stuff and the media reception. My sense is that over the last 48 hours or so, McCain's Celeb/Blackening campaign has been turning against him among pundits. But that doesn't mean the ads aren't resonating with voters, at least the class of voters McCain's campaign is trying to pull back into their column.

Actually, as the recent Pew study on media coverage reported, many in the press responded by reevaluating how they covered the candidates, and Obama's effort at playing the "race card" is seen as a major faux pas.

But check out Jennifer Rubin, who offers her usual cool analysis of the Obama post-Berlin fallout:

In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s overseas trip, the liberal punditocracy has begun to fret. Certainly there is reason for concern. Obama’s poll numbers are within the margin of error in a year in which a generic Democrat would be beating a generic Republican by double digits. And the storylines which dominated the news since the trip have been ones unfavorable to their chosen candidate: his ego, the snub of wounded U.S. soldiers in Germany, a potential flip-flop on offshore drilling and a poorly received attempt to play the race card.

Rubin follows this with a number of examples (and here's another), and then lays down the basic facts:

The bottom line: liberal pundits — following months of analysis by their conservative counterparts — had figured out that despite the best possible terrain for the Democrats to recapture the White House, the Democrats (with a whole lot of cheerleading from the mainstream media) have chosen a thinly experienced, irresolute, underachieving and obnoxious standard bearer. And his excuse-mongering just makes it all the more irritating.

It is not clear what provoked the soul-searching or why reality didn’t dawn on the pundits sooner. After all, they knew all along that he had virtually no experience and that he often sounded bizarrely confident about his nonexistent credentials.

Some might conclude that they were so blinded by their bias against Hillary Clinton and eagerness to shove the Clintons off the national stage that they ignored any signs that The Chosen One was deeply flawed. And, indeed, many of the faults that are potentially so dangerous in Obama — his predilection to lie when the heat is on and his lack of core principles — were even greater liabilities for Clinton in the media’s eyes.

It is also true that the McCain camp has shamed the media into recognizing their infatuation with Obama. By mocking the press, the McCain camp has made the argument in convincing fashion that the mainstream media has been in the tank for Obama. The McCain camp’s message: “Your boosterism has become painfully obvious.” So it’s not surprising that there might be some course correction and recognition that they’ve gone too far in building up The Ego and concealing his flaws.

But Obama has done his share to lift the veil from the pundits’ eyes. Sometimes the accumulated evidence is too much even for the mainstream media to ignore. And it is ironic (but not altogether surprising) that the tipping point may have been the Berlin rally — an explosion of ego and meaningless rhetoric which attained the level of self-parody.

So returning to Marshall's "Celeb/Blackening" meme, the folks on the left must cognitively spin and deny their own candidate's preponderant liabilities, while simultaneously alleging the emergence of the most heinous racist GOP smear campaign in the history of presidential elections.

To do so, the left has defined racism down to the point that any criticism Obama is attacked as a hegemonic manifestation of American's fundamentally iredeemable racist affliction.