The blog Popehat notes that Harvard professor of sociology Orlando Patterson is taking some dubious claims that have been circulating around the blogosphere public, crying racism in the Clinton campaign’s now famous 3 a.m./red phone ad via a New York Times op-ed, where he writes:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

The ad could easily have removed its racist sub-message by including images of a black child, mother or father — or by stating that the danger was external terrorism. Instead, the child on whom the camera first focuses is blond. Two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black — both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino.

If you’ll remember, I had some fun mocking these kinds of red phone conspiracy theories a few weeks ago.  But those were written by nobodies posting on little-read blogs (similar to the situation here at TWP).  This is a Harvard professor writing in the New York Times.  Things have officially gone too far.

The fundamental problem with the “racism in the red phone ad” theory, and Professor Patterson’s frame-by-frame analysis, is the fact that the footage of sleeping children was not shot by the Clinton campaign.  It was stock photography by Getty Images that was shot 10 years ago (as we discovered last week when one of the sleeping children turned out to be a 17-year-old volunteer for the Obama campaign).  The chances of a Getty stock photographer 10 years ago arranging a child’s pajamas to display the letters “N-I-G” or choosing children with the goal of giving a racial undertone to some political attack ad in the distant future is zero.  The chances of the Clinton admakers scouring through thousands of hours of stock video to find footage of sleeping children with complex subliminal racial undertones is also zero.

If you watch the ad, you’ll notice that there is actually a surprising lack of attention to detail.  The woman who comes in the room to check on the children is fully dressed– despite the fact that, according to the narrator, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning.  (What is she, a bartender?)  The reason is, again, it’s stock footage.  The Clinton campaign didn’t have the luxury of putting the woman in a nightgown, just like they didn’t have the luxury of choosing the race of the children, or the words on the children’s clothing.  The only thing they had control over was the two seconds of footage at the end of Hillary Clinton sitting at a desk answering the phone– which was footage taken from a different ad they shot last year.

In other words, the ad wasn’t shot by Oliver Stone, it was pieced together in a cutting room from months-old or years-old footage, with a narrator thrown in at the last minute to pull the images together.  Conspiracy theories over.

Now make no mistake, I believe the Clinton campaign’s tactics have been as subtly and deliberately racist as any campaign in recent memory– Republican or Democrat.  But when people like Orlando Patterson start crying wolf at every instance and accusing the Clintons of racism where obviously and provably none exists, it undermines the entire argument.  It gives just enough credence to the Geraldine Ferraros, who cry reverse racism in order to muddy the Obama campaign’s moral authority on the issue.  And it gives the Clinton campaign license to continue their subliminal attacks under the strengthened defense that Obama and his supporters have shown themselves to be prone to overreaction and oversensitivity, so of course they’re crying racism again– just like they did with the red phone ad.