All the buzz today is that Barack Obama has “injected” race into the presidential campaign with his comments earlier this week to an audience in Missouri: “Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face,” he said. “So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.”
The comments got the attention of John McCain‘s campaign manager, Rick Davis, who responded Thursday with a statement to the press saying, “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.” Since then, everybody and their mom has been debating whether or not the race card has been played, and it’s all really irritating.
Reading the headlines today, all I’ve been able to think is,”Hey, Obama’s not playing any race card! McCain is playing the ‘playing the race card’ card!” I was getting grumpier and grumpier about it until I found someone who did something more useful than get grumpy.
Newsweek’s Andrew Romano wrote an analysis of the situation yesterday, noting that “when playing the ‘playing the race card’ card, the impression you create – an impression of your rival saying something racially outrageous that benefits you politically – is far more important than whether or not you actually think he said something racially outrageous.” He lays out a persuasive argument both for why he doesn’t believe Obama is guilty as charged and why he doesn’t buy the McCain camp’s sincerity on the issue.
It’s a good read, and it made me feel better. But if Romano hadn’t written about playing the “playing the race card” card already, I’d get to think myself clever for having thought of it first. So now I’m grumpy again. I’m going to blame it all on McCain.
This article appears in August 1 • 2008.