Video: The forbidden Wright attack ad

(Hot Air) - A footnote to what Obama mega-shills like Sullivan and Joe Klein insist was the dirtiest campaign evah, yet somehow not so dirty that it would resort to a line of attack deemed legitimate by Obama himself. Fred Davis, McCain’s ad guy, tipped Time to the existence of this spot a few weeks ago, calling it his favorite of the campaign but a casualty of the fact that Maverick wanted to steer well clear of anything that could be demagogued as racist.

Davis says that concern about race played a major role in the entire aesthetic of McCain’s ads. The photographs of Obama that the ads used, for instance, which often showed Obama elongated and smiling, were carefully selected, he recalls. “We chose them with only one thing in mind, and that is to not make them bad pictures because bad pictures would be seen as racist,” Davis says. “How many shots in their ads did they use a John McCain [photo] looking decent and smiling?” He says the campaign also agonized over the music in the ads, paying special care not to play drum-heavy tracks that could be seen as an African tribal reference. “We were held to a totally different standard,” he says.