Remember that whole kerfuffle over an old, already publicly available video of the President speaking about Hurricane Katrina and talking about his "friend" Rev. Jeremiah Wright? The one that took place during the 24 hours leading up to the first Obama-Romney debate? You know what I'm talking about. You remember how Drudge had a post by Tucker Carlson hyping the video the afternoon before the debate, and then Carlson went on Hannity that night and screamed about how this "new" video of a speech (that everyone covered in 2007, including Tucker Carlson) showed Obama being "racially divisive" because he supposedly suggested that racism played a part in the government's inadequate response to Katrina--of course he said no such thing, as Juan Williams told Hannity to his face.
The Romney campaign did say that the video would not come up in the debate being held that night in Denver. On the other hand, Romney senior advisor Kevin Madden also encouraged voters to watch the video, saying that voters "have to look at that video and have to make up their mind on that individually."
OK, but then that story--rightly, I'll add--disappeared as the public discourse shifted to Obama's sub-optimal debate performance. But what if the whole point of the conservatives' coordinated effort had been something other than shifting voters' opinions of Obama by getting them worked up about Rev. Wright and race? What if that was a diversion? What if the real point had been specifically to influence the one person who mattered most 24 hours before the debate that would prove to save Mitt Romney's candidacy from likely oblivion? That person was of course Barack Obama.
To reiterate, this was an old speech, one that was attended by journalists and covered at the time extensively by the mainstream media years before conservatives "broke" this "story" of a supposedly "new" video. It was nothing like the Romney 47% remarks, which he made to a private gathering and which were thus actually news.
Did conservatives really think this was going to be a story with legs? Did they really think it would move voters? I don't think so. I think they released the story on the eve of the debate for one purpose and one purpose only: to spook (pun intended) Barack Obama. The purpose was to get in Barack Obama's head, and the heads of his advisors. For a million reasons, the President is wary of being unfairly characterized as an "angry black man," and I believe that wariness influenced him in the hours leading up to the Denver debate. After the debate, Michael Eric Dyson argued exactly that. Michael Moore made the same point:
But I'll go one step further. The whole point of the conservatives in releasing the video was to have that influence on Obama, to get him to be less assertive in the debate. Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity knew that the charges they were making were so absurd and so flimsy that wouldn't have any real impact in the minds of more than a few voters. It would have merely been a bonus if the video influenced a significant number of voters. The conservatives who pushed it knew it was a one day story. But I believe their goal in this instance was always to influence Obama. That's why they released it 24 hours before the debate, so that the debate would happen before the story had a chance to run its course and fade away.
With that story in the media, it would only reinforce the already existing mindset of the Obama team to lean toward being cautious because they were in the lead. Why take a chance? Especially now. Let the story of this speech blow over, and then it's back to business as usual.
So here's my question: With 24 hours left before the all-important 2nd presidential debate, the one where President Obama has a chance to regain his oft-cited mojo and retake control of this race--will conservatives throw another dirty trick at him this time? We'll know soon enough.
PS-Please check out my new book, where I explore the Obama has spoken about race--and the way the media and his opponents have commented on it--in much greater detail, as part of my larger analysis of his conception of American national identity: Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity, published last month by Potomac Books. You can read a review by DailyKos's own Greg Dworkin here.