US News

SHADY TV AD DARKENS ‘O’

A prominent left-wing Web site is questioning whether Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s campaign is playing the race card – by darkening the tone of Barack Obama‘s skin in a new TV attack ad.

The commercial, which began airing Monday in Texas, used footage from last week’s Ohio debate in which Obama admits that a Senate subcommittee he has led since early 2007 hasn’t held any hearings on Afghanistan because he’s been too busy campaigning.

“Call me crazy, but it certainly appears to me that Sen. Obama’s skin tone is significantly darker in the Clinton campaign commercial” than it appeared in the debate, wrote J. Thomas Cronin, who blogs on the Daily Kos Web site.

Obama’s campaign had no comment on the ad – which some Kos posters compared to Time magazine’s deliberate darkening of O.J. Simpson’s skin on an infamous famous 1994 cover.

Darkening a black person’s skin is seen by many as a deliberate way of making them seem more menacing.

Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson decried any sug gestion that Obama’s skin was deliberately darkened as “totally bogus.” “Coloration in every single screen shot looks different . . . It looks different in every single place,” said Carson.

He said that if the ad on Clinton’s Web site shows Obama’s skin as darker than the debate footage, it’s not deliberate.

“You are playing with complicated technological mediums here,” Carson told The Post.

But in earlier comments to Fox News, Carson said Obama’s skin was darkened as part of a “saturation-desaturation” process commonly used in TV commercial production.

Saturation refers to the amount of color in a picture, and it can be adjusted with common photo- or video-editing software.

A viewer watching Clinton’s ad on her campaign Web site and the debate as it appears on Youtube.com will find a visibly darker skin tone in the former first lady’s ad.

Clinton’s campaign even went so far as to deny that frame grabs from the ad and the debate posted on the Daily Kos Web site were theirs.

Daily Kos links to debate footage and to the ad are both from YouTube, though the ad link bounces first through the Washington Post’s Web site.

Carson told Fox News that Obama’s TV ads also changed Clinton’s skin tone. But he declined to provide any specific examples.

The ad questioned on the Kos blog was part of Clinton’s effort to portray Obama as inexperienced in foreign policy – a recurrent theme of her campaign in recent weeks.

Clinton’s campaign believes the line of attack used in the ad won her last-minute votes.

“Just by raising the issue, we have seen a defensive reaction from Sen. Obama and his campaign,” Clinton strategist Mark Penn said in a memo released Monday

Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was accused of raising Obama’s race as an issue after Obama’s victory in the South Carolina primary in January. Bill Clinton noted that Jesse Jackson had also won the state in 1984 and 1988.

bill.sanderson@nypost.com