A blogger at Daily Kos contends that Hillary’s recent ad “darkened” Barack Obama.

My favorite line from the blog post: “I’m not accusing Hillary of technically being a racist. But she is cynically exploiting racism to further her personal ambition, and it’s part of a pattern. She’s doing it to a fellow Democrat who’s virtually certain to be the nominee.”

The presidential campaign veteran who brought this to my attention noted, “The difference just isn’t that stark, and it’s hard to see how that would actually help her – certainly not when compared with the potential backlash. I’m not terribly familiar with video production, but I’d bet it was just made to fit the overall color pattern or perhaps came from a copy that wasn’t as good as the original. That seems more plausible… That said, had this ad come from a Republican, it would have been called transparently racist and no argument would have been allowed. While I would prefer the Left stop the race-baiting and paranoia, I’ll take some slight pleasure in the meantime watching the Democrats tripping on their own culture of paranoia and identity politics. They are hoist by their own dogwhistle.”

UPDATE: Several Campaign Spot readers with experience in the video field say this is much ado about nothing. Cameron notes:

The footage was obviously adjusted to be have greater contrast and less saturation. But so what? I do that to footage all the time to make it look better. Standard TV news lighting (as featured in the debate footage) is flat – it has too little contrast. Had the editor left the Obama footage alone, it would have felt out of place. But Obama wasn’t the only one who got the treatment, look at the dark shadows on the footage of Hillary. She looks terrible. But it fits the mood of the spot.
I always get a good laugh when people who have no working knowledge of TV production claim to be experts. The blogosphere has a way of pooling collective ignorance.

He also raises another fairly obvious point. Even if the footage was adjusted to make Obama “darker”… what genius on the Hillary campaign thinks that folks will vote for Obama in standard lighting, but will vote against him in darker lighting? And what worrywart backing Obama thinks that this will actually cost Obama votes? Is there any voter in America who doesn’t know that Obama is an African-American?

Finally, how many times have we seen campaign ads that utilize grainy, black-and-white video to make their opponent seem suspicious, ominous or sinister? Isn’t that pretty much par for the course?