The White House clearly believes that Dinesh D'Souza's "Kenyan Anti-Colonialism" nonsense makes them look good, because they keep mentioning it:
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs [took] to his Twitter account this week to air his exasperation over Forbes' controversial cover story on Barack Obama's political outlook. Gibbs asked why the magazine didn't hire a fact-checker for Dinesh D'Souza's caustic book excerpt, "How Obama Thinks." The press secretary then linked to a Columbia Journalism Review take-down of what it described as a "shameful" and "disgusting" attack.
But Gibbs didn't stop there. On Thursday, he met with Forbes' Washington bureau chief Brain Wingfield to express his concerns about inaccuracies in the piece, as the Washington Post reported yesterday.
Gibbs, after the meeting, told The Upshot that he asked Wingfield to "convey to New York my question of what their plan is to correct the many factual errors that I and others have pointed out about the cover story."
This is an administration that, in the past, has shown a very predictable skittishness in matters of race. From the beginning, they've taken to the idea that the president can only play defense and that it's to their advantage when race stays out of the argument. I don't think their aggressive pushback against D'Souza suggests they've abandoned this point of view; it's just that D'Souza's thesis is so blatantly offensive on its face that the White House thinks there's a political advantage to be gained by drawing attention to it. Although I suppose it's also possible that they're worried, in the aftermath of a poll showing the mistaken perception that the president is a Muslim is rising, that the piece subtly reinforces too many discrete conservative conspiracy theories about Obama.