Roll It, Pat It, Mark It With a 'B'

I wanted to wait on the Ashley Todd story until a bit more information came out — while there was some reason to be skeptical initially, that didn’t mean that it wasn’t true.

For those few of you unfamilliar with the story, Ashley Todd is a College Republican, working for McCain in Pennsylvania. Todd claimed she had been mugged by an African American who, seeing she was a McCain supporter, added insult to injury by carving a “B” into her cheek. The story was pushed by the usual suspects — the McCain camp, Matt Drudge, and Fox News, whose senior VP, John Moody, said:

Part of the appeal of, and the unspoken tension behind, Senator Obama’s campaign is his transformational status as the first African-American to win a major party’s presidential nomination.

That does not mean that he has erased the mutual distrust between black and white Americans, and this incident could become a watershed event in the 11 days before the election.

If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator  Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.

This was at the base of the story — the hope by the GOP that this story would exacerbate racial tensions, and allow the GOP to play up the story of scary black people rising up and attacking whites.

Moody also noted, “If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.” If so, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over:

A campaign worker who claimed she was the victim of a politically-motivated attack in which she was beaten, kicked and cut, now admits that she made the whole story up.

According to Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard, Ashley Todd, 20, told investigators today that she “was not robbed and there was no 6′4″ black male attacker.”

Todd initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield Wednesday night and that the suspect began beating her after seeing a John McCain bumper sticker on her car.

Todd claimed that the mugger even cut a backwards letter “B” in her check.

But today investigators say Todd confessed that the attack never happened.

Now, I don’t think the McCain campaign can be blamed for the actions of Ashley Todd, any more than the Obama campaign would have been at fault if this story had been true. But I do think that hard questions need to be asked about who was pushing this story.  As Pam notes, this is redolent of made-up crimes of the past, in which white people blamed African-Americans for crimes they themselves had committed. Why? Because we all know that those people are criminals. And the media is all too ready to believe that evil, feral African-American men lurk in every corner, waiting to attack decent white folk.

I suspect Todd was counting on that lack of skepticism to sell her story. She expected that a white woman saying she’d been attacked by a black man would simply be believed, and no matter how ridiculous some of the flourishes — like a backwards “B” — were, people would assume that a nice white girl from Texas wouldn’t lie about such things.

Fortunately, the Pittsburgh police were not as credulous as Todd expected them to be. Even Michelle Malkin, to her credit, found the story odd before it was blown up. And the stunt was exposed before it became part of the long wingnut list of grievances. Todd failed in her effort to drive a wedge between whites and blacks in this country — for that, clearly, was her aim. Maybe that means we’re making progress. Or maybe it just means that Todd was incompetent. Either way, her actions were despicable, and we can be grateful she failed.