Hillary's Appeal to Racism Is a Project, Not an Accident

Hillary Clinton's evolving attacks to define and brand Barack Obama involve what advertising and marketing professionals call impressions—the projection of one image (in this case Barack Obama) onto one human brain (a voter).

Designing and managing Obama’s brand by generating impressions for the benefit of Hillary running in the primary, it is necessary to merge negative (ostensibly plausible) aspects of Obama onto the consciousness of key voting demographics susceptible to certain appeals based on fear and xenophobia.

The more frequent and emotionally potent the impression, the greater is the political impact.

That’s why we see the escalation after the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary of Hillary's project of generating political impressions of Muslim, Black, stranger, unsteady, Ken Starr, creepy, inexperience, and so on.

One threat to the project is the negative reaction of the African-American community and its allies well-versed in recognizing racist appeals, subtle or not so subtle. This threat is being realized today as we see Obama taking some 80 to 90 percent of the African-American vote in primaries and caucuses.

Hillary's amoral and empirically valid branding of her opponent is more simply stated as an old South appeal to racism.

Concomitant with branding Obama is the project of projecting Hillary as a unique and convincing brand of steady, strong, experienced, familiar, and knowledgeable.

Even among Democratic-voting communities with a negative predisposition towards Hillary, this brand of Hillary with the above positive qualities rings true, so we see Hillary present her Commander-in-Chief credentials, including vast foreign policy and national security experience.

Facts can get in the way of Hillary's project. And we do see the occasional piece knocking down Hillary's brand. See today's Clinton's foreign experience is more limited than she says, for example

But William Douglas's thoughtful and rigorous piece in McClatchy Newspapers noted above makes less an impact than Hillary's crash kitchen sink, branding program.

After all, Hillary's is not an appeal to thoughtfulness and issue analysis; rather it is an emotional appeal to unthinking racist sentiments that can be identified in micro-demographics by Hillary's campaign devoted to the enterprise.

Some demographics can be counted on to combat Hillary’s racist, divisive project (for example):

- Today's socially tolerant under-29 vote

- Social justice progressives

- Casually political, middle-class Americans fed-up with Bush and division and concerned about fairness

Hillary is hoping these spheres remain marginalized and ineffective in Pennsylvania and the coming campaign.

Selling her soul is not a decisive factor to consider. As Hillary once said in a different context, face reality!