McCain Camp: Obama Played Race Card

The McCain campaign has just released the following statement: (via email)

U.S. Senator John McCain's presidential campaign today issued the following statement from McCain Campaign Manager Rick Davis in response to Barack Obama's comments in Springfield, Rolla and Union, Missouri, yesterday:

"Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

The statement comes in response to remarks that Obama made yesterday on the campaign trail. There were several variations of the remarks. Here is one excerpt:

They're going to try to say that I'm a risky guy, they're going to try to say, 'Well, you know, he's got a funny name, and he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills,' and they're going to send out nasty e -mails. And the latest one they got me in an ad with Paris Hilton. You know, never met the woman. But, you know, what they're going to try to argue is that somehow I'm too risky. You know, basically what they're saying to you is we know we didn't do a real good job, but he's too risky." (Barack Obama, Remarks, Union, MO, 7/30/08)

This controversy comes on the heels of a storm of negative reaction to the McCain campaign's recent tactics.

Is Obama playing the race card, or calling out passive/aggressive xenophobes?



The notion that race is a "card" to be "played" has always been offensive to me, to begin with. The implication is that racism is a rhetorical construct, used to win arguments and nothing more. Calling an accusation of racism "the race card" is, itself, playing the "race card" card, a way of ending the debate and avoiding examining the charge.

That said, I don't believe Obama is accusing the McCain campaign of racism, at least not the Willie Horton/Jesse Helms "Hands"-style racism that the GOP is famous for.

A consistent theme of this campaign has been that Obama is "different," not "one of us," even that he's somehow un-American. Smear after often contradictory smear has been thrown at him, but the common thread is, "he's different." Some of it has been coded and subtle, some has not, but it is unmistakable.

Obama brings up another angle on this, however. In that video clip, he mentions that McCain's new ad features Obama with Paris Hilton. It also features Britney Spears. ABC News' David Wright asked about the selection on yesterday's conference call, and the McCain campaign asserted that, along with Barack Obama, these were the two biggest celebrities in the world.

I thought it was odd at the time, but I chalked it up to their ad guys being out of touch. Being from the North, miscegenation isn't a big component of our racial tension, so I'm apt to miss it, but looking at it now, it seems strange that they would pick the two blondest, whitest, femalest celebrities in the world.

Bob Corker played a similar variation on the Southern Strategy against Harold Ford, Jr., with his "Call Me" ad.

The thing about these tacit evocations of raceism is that they are designed with deniability in mind. At the very least, it is worthy of discussion. If the idea was realy to show the biggest celebrities in the world, and not to put Obama in a dissolve with 2 white girls, why not use the actual biggest celebrity in the world, Oprah Winfrey?


It will be a neat trick if the McCain campaign can deflect attention away from its intensely negative campaigning by accusing Obama of noticing it.



Update: Bill Press at HuffPo is surer than I am of the miscegenation angle.