What Ron Brownstein Said That I Said

Is he reading me? This just happened on MSNBC:

Andrea Mitchell (MSNBC): Ron, Rick Davis said that this is Obama playing the race card. What is your take on this?

Ron Brownstein: Rick Davis said something that astounded me, that he can't imagine where Barack Obama was thinking that the McCain campaign was introducing race into the campaign. Andrea, there are a lot of famous people in the world: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen, Bono. All of them are globally more famous than Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. And yet, when trying to illustrate their argument about celebrity, the McCain campaign chose the images of two young white blond women to flash those images immediately adjacent to Barack Obama and, you know, we have seen this move before. In many ways, this ad is reminiscent of the ad that the Republican National Committee ran against Harold Ford -- who is now a commentator on this network -- in 2006, and I think the McCain campaign should be asked much more firmly why they chose these particular celebrities to illustrate the point. If you want to make the point that he's a celebrity, Tom Cruise is not more globally famous than Paris Hilton? Is that really a plausible argument? What are the things that those two people have in common? They were young white blond women.

That's pretty much the argument I made. The dogwhistle is very transparent. And I do see it as a maturation of the porgressive movement that mainstream journalists can pick up on and parrot these themes so quickly. It's actually something we did quite well during the Republican primaries.

A shout-out to me at Hullabaloo would have been nice, though...