Pat Dollard

Tweet

The Hill:

Democratic strategist Tad Devine, an adviser to the Al Gore and John Kerry presidential campaigns, accused Mitt Romney’s campaign of invoking the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a recent ad.

Devine said Wednesday that he was “shocked” to see what he believed was imagery of an African-American church in an ad released Tuesday by Romney’s campaign team and airing in New Hampshire. The ad, Romney’s first of the campaign, is “clearly an attempt to bring back Rev. Wright and race,” Devine tweeted.

In the ad, a series of images including those of a foreclosed home and empty businesses flash by as text criticizes President Obama’s economic record. But at two points, the imagery cuts to well-dressed African-American women walking down a large hallway, and pans over a predominantly black audience.

“It appears to be a congregation of African-American people,” Devine told The Hill. “In the first scene there are no white people at all, in the second … it is all African Americans except possibly one person, [whose race] you can’t really tell.”

Devine said he believes these images were selected intentionally to invoke race and the controversy involving Wright, the president’s former pastor.

“As someone who does this for a living, there is absolutely no way that’s not intentional,” Devine said. “There is no other rational explanation for that scene other than to suggest a racial reference, and most likely invoke Jeremiah Wright.”

The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While there is no explicit link to an African-American church congregation or Wright, Devine said there is no way the campaign couldn’t have recognized the imagery it was selecting, and the connotations it carried.

He said Romney might have selected the racial imagery to help with voters in South Carolina, where the former Massachusetts governor trailed Newt Gingrich 31 percent to 16 percent in a recent The Polling Company poll.

“I would speculate that Gov. Romney and his campaign are concerned that they’re losing South Carolina so badly right now they’re using every tool in the toolbox — including the most pernicious tool in American politics, and that’s race and racial imagery,” Devine said.

In the 2008 presidential election, Wright, who was Obama’s pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, was denounced for inflammatory statements, including contending that the Sept. 11 attacks were proof that “America’s chickens [were] coming home to roost.”

Obama responded to the Wright controversy, and discussed the political culture of black churches, in a Philadelphia speech titled “A More Perfect Union.” Wright, who has since retired as senior pastor of the church, later accused “them Jews” in the Obama administration of keeping him away from the president.

Devine went on to compare the Romney ad to a controversial ad aired by the George W. Bush campaign in 2000. In that spot, about prescription drug benefits, images of then-Vice President Gore were contrasted with text that read, “Bureaucrats decide.” But as the word “bureaucrats” disappeared from the screen, the text lingered to just flash “RATS,” in a move that some suggested was an attempt at subliminal messaging.