Former President Barack Obama is sending a cease-and-desist letter to South Carolina TV stations demanding they not air a Republican ad that misuses his words to attack his former vice president, Joe Biden...
The super PAC aired a similar amount of ads attacking Biden in Nevada that targeted Hispanics and concerned the issue of immigration. This ad aims at the majority black electorate in South Carolina, a must-win state for Biden, by misleadingly using Obama’s words from his 1995 book “Dreams from My Father” to suggest that the former president believes his vice president supports “plantation politics” that hurt African Americans.”
A spokesman for Obama says “in the interest of truth in advertising, we are calling on TV stations to take this ad down and stop playing into the hands of bad actors who seek to sow division and confusion among the electorate.”
Ted Harvey, chairman of the Committee to Defend the President, defended the ad in a statement to Politico saying:
“[T]he Committee has a long history of taking on Joe Biden, beyond Nevada and South Carolina. President Obama made a point in his book about Democrats paying lip-service to the African-American community and we believe his point applies perfectly to Joe Biden. It took President Trump to lower black unemployment and create jobs for the African-American community, in addition to passing criminal justice reform. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is simply giving lip-service for votes. That’s the point President Obama made in his book, and we have every right to use his own words — in his own voice — in the political forum.”