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John Mccain plays the 'Race Card' card, Keith olbermann comments

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[Keith olbermann comments on a] new campaign tactic that arose in response to Barack Obama's candidacy, that flourished in the hands of Bill Clinton during the Democratic primary and that has now found a home in John McCain's Crystal City headquarters...McCain campaign manager Rick Davis sent a terse, two-sentence statement to reporters. "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck," it read. "It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong." Soon, Davis was claiming on MSNBC that Team Obama "has been feeding to journalists, all night last night and all day today, the notion that somehow something that we have done in our campaign... had racial overtones," while McCain himself was characterizing the "race card" accusation as "legitimate" and confessing that he's "disappointed that Senator Obama would say the things he's saying." My initial reaction was confusion. What did Obama say? I asked myself. Did he call McCain "Whitey McWhiteguy"? Did he deliver a Black Power salute from an Olympic podium? Did he accuse his rival of race-baiting, or bigotry, or not having any black friends? These options seemed unlikely. For one thing, Obama is not a masochistic madman bent on his own political destruction. For another, Obama has been very careful--with the partial exception of South Carolina--to never overtly encourage the accusations of racism, lest they undermine his appeal to the country's white majority as an African-American candidate who, unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, isn't also seen as the "bearer of racial grievance." So I couldn't imagine he'd start now. It certainly wouldn't help him politically. But then I remembered: one doesn't actually have to play the "race card" to end up on the receiving end of the "playing the race card" card. In fact, that's sort of the point. Apparently, the McCain campaign was reacting--some would say overreacting--to a series of statements Obama made yesterday in Missouri. "Since they don't have any new ideas, the only strategy they've got in this election is to try to scare you about me," he told supporters in Union. "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." Some observers, like Jake Tapper of ABC News, interpreted this as Obama "accus[ing] McCain of running a racist, xenophobic campaign." On the surface, I can see why this makes sense. After all, Washington and Lincoln look pretty white on those greenbacks. But there are two pretty compelling reasons why this doesn't wash. First, Obama didn't say that anyone is misbehaving now. He said they're "going to" misbehave in some amorphous future. Some have argued that this is a mere semantic difference--in effect, "a pretty clear effort at having it both ways." But that's not how it strikes me. To me, Obama's point seems neither accusatory nor, truth be told, predictive. It seems strategic. What he's doing is acknowledging all the subterranean doubts and suspicions that threaten his bid--his race, his name, his otherness--and saying, preemptively, that to succumb to them would be to fall prey to "politics as usual." He's neutralizing the insinuations that voters are bound to hear (from friends, neighbors, radio hosts, whomever). But he's not saying that substantive disagreements--on the issues, on his record--are somehow race-related. And he's certainly not calling McCain a racist. There are ways, of course, that Obama could have played the race card. If he had accused McCain, for example, of implying that he has "a taste for young white women" by featuring his face alongside Britney Spears' and Paris Hilton's in yesterday's "Celeb" ad--as liberal blogger Josh Marshall has done--the charge might have merit. But Obama rightly recognized that while the spot may have been a lot of things--an insinuation about his foreignness; a potential homage to Leni Riefenstahl; a bald-faced bid (look! starlets!) for free media attention--it wasn't a subliminal message about miscegenation. Fortunately, every sentient life form knows who Hilton and Spears are, making it impossible to imagine them--unlike the anonymous blond bimbo saying "Call me" in 2006's infamous Harold Ford, Jr. commercial--as Obama's paramours. So the Democrat simply dismissed it. http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/07/31/playing-the-playing-the-race-card-card.aspx

Category: News
Uploaded: August 2nd, 2008 @ 10:18 pm
Author: AntiConformist911

Length: 09:04
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Tags: ad barack black britney card celebrity davis hilton john keith mccain obama olbermann paris race racism racist rick schmidt spears steve white

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