McCain ad tweaks colors to highlight 'foreign' smear

As I noted on Thursday, John McCain's Paris Hilton ad flashes the word "foreign" on the screen next to Barack Obama's face. The point seemed obvious to me: McCain was calling Barack a foreigner. (An odd thing to do given that Barack was born in the United States, while McCain was born in Panama.)

Some might say that I was reading too much into that aspect of the ad, that McCain's only goal was to discuss the issue at hand, "foreign oil."

But yesterday, Markos posted the actual screenshot and I noticed something else: the letters in the phrase "more foreign" are brighter than the letters in the word "oil." In other words, McCain tweaked the image so that "more foreign" would pop more from the screen than "oil."

Take a look for yourself (view the ad here):

An easy way to compare the brightness of the letters in each word is to take a look at the letter 'I' which both words share in the middle. I measured the color at the centerpoint of each occurrence of 'I' -- the color on the left is from "foreign" and the color on the right is from "oil."

On the left: the font color of "foreign"
On the right: the font color of "oil"

As you can see, there's no doubt McCain's ad intentionally brightens the word "foreign." (The color of the 'I' in "foreign" is #faede3, while it is #dfd5cc in "oil.") The obvious goal is to focus attention on the phrase, and associate it with Barack Obama.

It's pretty much an open and shut case. It's as clear an indication as we'll get that McCain is intentionally trying to smear Obama with the foreign label -- and it comes in an ad in which McCain takes pride.