In a move that Ambinder calls "a rare, unforced error," Michelle Obama's advance team declared within a student journo's earshot that they need more white people in the group sitting behind her at an event at Carnegie Mellon University last week.
The Tartan, the Pittsburgh school's paper, wrote:
While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama's event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan's correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, "Get me more white people, we need more white people." To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, "We're moving you, sorry. It's going to look so pretty, though."
It's obvious to any one who has ever attended a campaign rally that the people who sit behind the candidate (and thus in the camera shot) are carefully selected for their demographic representation. (What, you thought they just arrived first and grabbed the plum seats?) At a November Obama rally in Fort Madison, Iowa, for instance, I noticed that the number of blacks on stage behind the senator roughly equalled the number of blacks in the crowd.
