Here's the Brutal Anti-Biden Ad Obama's Trying To Get Taken Off the Air in South Carolina
Joe Biden and his former boss have apparently never heard of the Streisand effect. If they have, it’s one of the many things they appear to have forgotten along the way to the 2020 campaign trail.
If you’re unfamiliar, let me elucidate. Many years ago, in the early days of the internet, Barbra Streisand was annoyed that a photo of her beachfront house had appeared on the internet as part of a study of California coastal erosion. She sued for $50 million to have it removed. Before the suit, not even 10 people had viewed the image online. After the 2003 suit, that number quickly grew to 420,000. Seventeen years later, that number has to be in the millions.
The object lesson was clear: Don’t draw attention to stuff people weren’t likely to pay much attention to on their own.
This isn’t a lesson the former president and vice president have taken to heart.
First, Biden tried to get an ad taken off Facebook that he said distorted the facts around his son Hunter’s work for Ukrainian energy firm Burisma and the former vice president’s pressure on Ukrainian officials to fire a purportedly crooked prosecutor who had investigated Burisma. Facebook refused and the only thing it seemed to do was alert people to the ad’s existence.
Now, Biden’s former boss is Streisanding it up in South Carolina over another anti-Biden ad, this one using a clip from one of Obama’s audiobooks.
According to The Washington Post, Barack Obama’s lawyers will send a cease-and-desist letter to a pro-Trump super PAC, the Committee to Defend the President, demanding it pull an advertisement that uses a clip of Obama reading from his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father” and juxtaposing it with Biden’s record on race.
“This despicable ad is straight out of the Republican disinformation playbook, and it’s clearly designed to suppress turnout among minority voters in South Carolina by taking President Obama’s voice out of context and twisting his words to mislead viewers,” a statement from Obama communications director Katie Hill read.
“In the interest of truth in advertising, we are calling on TV stations to take this ad down and stop playing into the hands of bad actors who seek to sow division and confusion among the electorate.”
The problem is that the quote isn’t out of context so much as re-contextualized.
It involves Obama talking about how Democratic politicians treated the black community — and, as it plays, captions describe exactly how Biden’s treated the black community in the same disingenuous way Obama was describing.
“Joe Biden promised to help our community. It was a lie. Here’s President Obama,” the ad begins.
“Plantation politics. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant,” Obama said.
“But when the so-called black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket. Sell our souls for a Christmas turkey.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s record on race — which still creates an unreal amount cognitive dissonance when viewed alongside his polling numbers with the black community, shrinking though they may be — is outlined over Obama’s not-inaccurate take on how certain Democrats view the minority vote.
You can watch the ad for yourself here:
Andrew Bates, Biden’s campaign spokesman, called the ad a “despicable torrent of misinformation.”
“Donald Trump and his allies are absolutely terrified that Joe Biden will defeat him in November. Trump even got himself impeached by trying to force another country to lie about the vice president,” Bates said.
“This latest intervention in the Democratic primary is one of the most desperate yet, a despicable torrent of misinformation by the president’s lackeys.”
If there’s a falsehood about the former vice president in the advertisement, it might have behooved Bates to mention it. The fact is this has always been Biden’s weakness with the black community: His popularity is at odds with his policy record, which is laid bare in adumbrated form in the ad.
Even the former vice president’s many Freudian slips and gaffes would have otherwise sunk a man who couldn’t deploy the three-word mantra “my friend Barack” to smooth over any problems.
On the subject of his friend Barack in 2007, Biden famously said that he was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” (You almost assume there were handlers in the room who shot him a glare, stopping him from going on to say that “he doesn’t use any of that hippity-hop language either, like ‘jiggy’ or whatever. Such a smart young man.”)
Then there was the gaffe I find myself repeatedly bringing up because I can’t believe the media’s just glossed over it: “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids,” Biden said at an education town hall last summer.
All of that background is what makes the ad damning — and perfect.
If Trump’s PACs don’t want Biden to run against the president, pointing this out in South Carolina isn’t the worst idea. I would suspect it’s more of a hedge, considering Biden still has a shot at the nomination and plans to use race as a wedge issue if he becomes the Democrat standard-bearer.
This is someone who decided to use Charlottesville as the backdrop for his candidacy announcement, for pity’s sake. His campaign is now throwing a conniption because someone’s trying to disabuse black voters of the notion that Biden is anything more than the kind of almost stereotypical Democratic plantation politician about whom Obama wrote 25 years ago in “Dreams from My Father”? Spare us.
As for Obama’s and his lawyers objecting to the use of the audio, one would hope they’re familiar with the concept of fair use, which almost assures any legal action is going to fail.
In 2017, another pro-Trump PAC used the same audio snippet ahead of the much-ballyhooed Jon Ossoff-Karen Handel special election.
There was a bunch of low-key whinging about how the clip was taken out of context — but no legal action. The ad got a millisecond’s worth of attention in a race that the media covered with breathless intensity, something that probably ought to have served as a lesson for Obama and Biden.
But, no.
The cease-and-desist letters is about to be sent and the media is now putting a spotlight on the advertisement, something Obama and Biden will probably end up regretting considering its factual accuracy.
It’s rare that I’m forced to say this, but if they’d only listened to Barbra Streisand.
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