The Race Card

Pretty funny. The Republicans, who for months have been feeding a whisper campaign about Barack Obama based on his race, religion, background, name, whatever -- are now accusing the Obama campaign of using the "race card".

You gotta be kidding me. And now John McCain, more in sadness than in anger, admits that yes, the Obama campaign is being racist against him:



The NY Times editorial board chimes in:

The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — suggesting to voters that he’s nothing more than a bubble-headed, publicity-seeking celebrity.

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

Mr. Obama called Mr. McCain on the ploy, saying, quite rightly, that the Republicans are trying to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills.’’

But Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, had a snappy answer. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” he said. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.’’

The retort was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. It puts the sin for the racial attack not on those who made it, but on the victim of the attack.

It also — and we wish this were coincidence, but we doubt it — conjurs up another loaded racial image.

The phrase dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck” entered the national lexicon during the O.J. Simpson saga. Robert Shapiro, one of Mr. Simpson’s lawyers, famously declared of himself, Johnny Cochran and the rest of the Simpson defense team, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”

It’s ugly stuff. How about we leave Britney, Paris, and O.J. out of this — and have a presidential campaign?

Billmon has more.

Joe Klein think John McCain is showing himself to be a poor leader.

And McCain was asked by a supporter about his ridiculous Britney-Paris ad. This is what he said:

MCCAIN: But what we are talking about here is substance and not style. And what we are talking about is who has an agenda for the future of America. Campaigns are tough, but I’m proud of the campaign that we have run. I’m proud of the issues that we have been trying to address with the American people…. So, all I can say is that we are proud of that commercial.

The guy is a laughingstock. We'd better fucking win this election, that's all I have to say.