Conservatives have a "hate based" campaign against Obama?

Paul Waldman at The American Prospect blames conservatives for all of Obama's race problems.

For months, I've been predicting that conservatives would delicately prompt voters to see Barack Obama through the lens of race. They'd drop hints, they'd make roundabout arguments, they'd find a hundred subtle ways to encourage people to vote their prejudices, while denying vociferously that they were doing anything of the sort.

Oh, it gets better:

...these kinds of attacks have their greatest power when they tap into pre-existing archetypes voters already carry with them, and the deeper they reside in our lizard brains the better. So they will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He's not the unthreatening black man, he's the scary black man. He's Al Sharpton, he's Malcom X, he's Huey Newton. He'll throw grievance in your face, make you feel guilty, and who knows, maybe kill you and rape your wife.

What???!!

The Republicans are certainly setting down their marker: they intend, as they have so many times before, to wage a campaign appealing to the ugliest prejudices, the most craven fears, the most vile hatreds. It's not that people should vote against Obama just because he's black, they're saying, but you know, he's that kind of black.

When did we say that exactly? When did we start waging this campaign? Because I did not get the memo.

You see, none of this has anything to do with the fact that Obama's pastor for 20 years is a racist himself. Although I can't figure out how Pastor Wright raging against white America isn't the cause of this, but allowing America to see him raging is.

As I recall NBC news first aired the video clips of Pastor Wright and soon all other news agencies followed. I thought we conservatives were only in charge of Fox News. Heh.

crossposted at NewsBusters