The Daily Kos yesterday noticed that in an attack ad that ran in Ohio last weekend, the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately darkened and widened a photo of Barack Obama, in what Kos called “a concerted effort by Clinton’s ad people to make Obama look darker, more sinister, and with a wider nose.”  When initially reached for comment, the Clinton campaign denied emphatically that the ad was theirs, until Kos pulled a screen grab of the video directly off the Clinton campaign Web site:

Oops.

Here’s a report by Fox News where the Clinton campaign writes in to say that the video was indeed theirs, and the image was “darkened as part of a saturation/desaturation process typical in commercial production.” Though no word on why the image was also widened.

And finally, a Kos reader makes the case visually that this was no accident, showing exactly how Clinton’s ad team got from point A to point B:

Some have said that the Clinton campaign has learned from the enormous backlash in South Carolina that the race card won’t work for them and thus has noticably backed off. But it looks more like they’ve just gotten smarter about where to play it and better at hiding it.

These types of underhanded tactics may work in Ohio (where, maybe not coincidentally, 20% of voters said that race was an important factor in their decision and 80% of those voted for Clinton) and Pennsylvania, and surely we’ll see more as the race stretches on. But the voters in less polarized states like Wyoming and Oregon, as well as voters in the heavily-African-American Mississippi and North Carolina primaries, may have a different take.