In December of 2007, amid the low-grade fever of anti-Mormonism that had burdened his Presidential campaign since its inception, Mitt Romney delivered a speech at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library titled “Faith in Politics.” Peppered with democratic niceties (“Freedom and religion endure together or perish alone,” and “During the holiday season nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places”) the speech was memorable largely for how forgettable it was. Four months later, in the midst of his own faith-based campaign crisis, Barack Obama delivered a speech in Philadelphia titled “A More Perfect Union.” Offhandedly referred to as “the race speech,” it was also a lucid, even profound meditation on the role of religion in our national politics. Obama’s speech was met with effusive praise, published in a volume alongside the Gettysburg Address and Emerson’s essay on self-reliance, and given out by the thousands by the campaign itself. And that contrast as much as anything explains the Romney campaign’s allergic reaction to the “Ricketts Plan,” the proposal for T.D. Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts to spend ten million dollars on a campaign that would have savaged Obama for his relationship with Jeremiah Wright.

Aside from the Romney team’s preference to keep the discussion on the economy, they likely feel that the less this election centers on discussions of religions with a history of bigotry, the better. Besides, when someone hits a grand slam off a slider, the wise pitcher doesn’t throw the same batter another slider in his next at-bat. This election season has already delivered the signal irony of Democrats possibly welcoming the return of Jeremiah Wright as a topic of conversation and Republicans running away from it. The Romney campaign—and the R.N.C.—may have realized not only that their candidate has a glass-house problem, but that the guy across the street has a bigger slingshot.

Yet what stands out most about the now-discarded Ricketts Plan—aside from the unwieldy but unforgettable appellation applied to Obama, “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln”—is not its myopia on religion but its even more myopic perspective on race. The plan to recruit an “extremely literate, conservative African American” as a spokesperson suggests that being merely black and right-leaning won’t cut it (literacy tests!). Beyond that, the section titled “Fending Off Racism” betrays a faith in that most outmoded of social tools: the Professional Black Friend.

In an age in which cynicism is the default setting for much of the public, the belief that a single black spokesperson can offer insulation from charges of racism is less than tenable. It assumes that, in 2012, the majority of (white) people are not skeptical or savvy enough to see through that kind of ruse—a circumstance where cynicism wielded against cynicism, like multiplying two negative numbers, yields a positive result.

The fifty-four-page proposal manages to be both retrograde and novel simultaneously. It’s Jurassic racism in the sense that it shackles Jeremiah Wright to aged fears about angry black men. But there’s a twist: the strategy doesn’t so much underestimate black people as it underestimates white people’s thinking about black people. The abiding irony here is that the campaign would have been directed at voters—presumably white voters—who, by the strategists’ own admission, still very much like Barack Obama. It could be argued that the idea that the presence of black radio host Larry Elder would be enough to placate white uneasiness about the race-baiting tones of the proposed ad campaign is itself racist—toward whites. (Soft bigotry, low expectations.)

Time was when the assent of a single African-American was hailed as evidence of benign intent in even the most reactionary of schemes. In the late nineteenth-century, white legislators pointed to Isaiah Montgomery, a black Mississippi state representative who voted in favor of disfranchising the state’s black population. In the nineteen-fifties, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston railed publicly against the Brown v. Board of Education decision, offering at least a gossamer rationale that opposition to integration didn’t necessarily make one, you know, racist. The point here is that black people have as much right to be on the wrong side of history (or in this case, strategy) as anyone else. The difference that Fred Davis and company missed is in the declining returns that can be realized by using those people who are on the wrong side of history for their own purposes.

In 1991, Clarence Thomas’s cynical deployment of American racial history and reference to “high-tech lynching” stopped his (white) political antagonists in their tracks. In 2011, Herman Cain’s use of the term brought scarcely a pause to the media inquest into his alleged coital wanderings and history of harassment complaints. It’s not that the public became less concerned about appearing to be racist, just more skeptical about race being deployed as a fig leaf. The consultants who came up with the Ricketts plan are running the old operating system.

To be fair, the authors also suggested a series of focus groups to help them diminish “elements that could reasonably be deemed ‘racist.’” We haven’t seen the end of racism in our politics, but we at least require a bit more by way of plausible deniability. Lose the elements that could be “reasonably” deemed racist and we’re left with the irrational racist elements—which, I suppose, is as good a starting place as any.

Photograph of Jeremiah Wright, from 2008. Douglas Healey/AP Photo.