I don’t like McCain, and have absolutely no intention of ever voting for him (he put his name on the McCain-Feingold “Screw the First Amendment” Act, so he’s persona non grata to me), but this seems pretty flimsy:

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

The attack on Harold Ford, as far as I can tell, centered around his playboy reputation. The interpretation of it being racist seems to have been centered around “pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.” That’s not anything I would’ve called racism, but I’m kind of oblivious to most racial stereotypes, so maybe it’s more overt than I realize.

Contrast that to McCain’s ad. Here’s the summary from the NY Times piece linked above:

The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — suggesting to voters that he’s nothing more than a bubble-headed, publicity-seeking celebrity.

The McCain ad doesn’t even have the pre-existing prejudices mentioned above to make it seem racist. Instead, according to the New York Times, it is racist because it is “similar” to an ad that was racist. The Times can’t even explain why the ad is racist on its own merits, so instead, they use the alleged racism of another ad that is completely unrelated except that white women happen to be featured in both ads.

This is similar to saying that every member of the KKK breathes, therefore anyone who breathes is racist. It’s farcical — and this is supposed to be one of the most influential newspapers in the world? Please.

The problem here is that the charge of Obama’s inexperience and lack of substance is pretty hard to defend against, so the Times has to come up with something to counter it. That they’re stretching themselves this far shows exactly how vulnerable Obama is to this sort of criticism.

Not that that will stop the Times (and most other mainstream media outlets) from fawning over Obama. After all, he took a whirlwind tour of a few nations and, according to many journalists, this somehow “countered” McCain’s accusation of Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. I’ve been out of the country, but that doesn’t mean I have any experience building policy for relations between the United States and Mexico.