Obama campaign website yanks controversial BET videos after being called out
The Daily Caller reports,
President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign website has removed several videos that pitched alarmist messages to African-American voters, following reporting by The Daily Caller and the Fox News Channel.
In one video that the campaign yanked from the “African-Americans for Obama” section of its website Tuesday, actress Tatyana Ali seemed to predict that a second Obama term would bring a host of benefits to African-Americans once the president no longer had to concern himself with campaigning.
“What really excites me … is that a U.S. president has only two terms,” a laughing Ali said in the footage that the Obama campaign scrubbed from its website Tuesday. “In the second term, ‘it’s on,’ because we don’t have to worry about re-election.” . . .
Obama’s deputies are running an under-the-radar campaign intended to scare African-Americans to the polls, said Jeffrey Bell, a veteran GOP strategist.
His campaign advisers are confident that “he’s going to get 95 percent [of the African-American bloc], but they’re worried about turnout,” he added.
The result is that the campaign will broadcast the message — often outside the view of the established media — that “any opposition to Obama is based on race, and it is open season [on African-Americans] if he loses,” Bell said.
The BET videos include a raft of black-targeted messaging, including a reminder that Obama has delivered $1 billion dollars to historically black colleges and universities and $3 billion in contracts and loans to African-Americans entrepreneurs.
Stephanie Brown, Obama’s national director for the African-American vote, made that pitch, saying the president has “shown our communities … he can deliver the change that he talked about in 2008, so we need to continue to have his back.”