The Clinton campaign resorted to race baiting early and often in this election season. And lately they’ve moved on to fear mongering.

But, after reading Orlando Patterson’s New York Times op-ed today, I might have to coin a new phrase: racial fear mongering baiting. OK, that phrase isn’t going anywhere — but Patterson’s analysis of the racial undertones in Clinton’s now infamous “3 a.m.” ad should:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad?s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

This reading shouldn’t have surprised me — pandering to America’s racial prejudices and manipulating America’s fears, of course, have never been mutually exclusive. But I did miss it on my first, cursory viewings of the ad — maybe because I quickly saw and dismissed its evocations of early LBJ and Mondale fear-based ads.

With this perspective, the fact that many voters in Ohio and elsewhere might have fallen for it makes me even more depressed that I already was.

One sign of hope, though, might be that the sleeping white girl that is the initial focus of the ad (the opening sequence is actually old stock footage) is a big Obama supporter — and is letting everyone know it. She’s not sleeping anymore, it seems.

My broader hope is that Americans are not buying this stuff anymore. In this media-saturated political age, in fact, Americans have — maybe unwittingly — become fairly sophisticated viewers of all of these verbal and visual machinations. The initial race baiting, after all, came back to bite the Clintons.

The media will need to help, though. They’ll need to make a bigger deal out of Clinton’s “as far as I know” response to a question about Obama’s religious background.

And they’ll need to jump all over Geraldine Ferraro’s latest series of comments about how Obama is only winning because he’s a black man and she’s only being criticized for thinking that because she’s white.