Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama is anything but naïve. He knew the instant that he tossed his hat in the presidential ring that race would be an issue, maybe even the dominating issue in the White House campaign. No matter how much generic, race neutral talk he made about hope and change, and no matter how much time he spent talking about the Iraq War, the Iran Missile threat, the war on terrorism, a tanking economy, and the lack of affordable health care, race would lurk close to the surface.
So it's hardly a revelation that Republican rival John McCain would turn the tables and accuse Obama of playing the race card. This deft or crude bit of reverse political psychology says Obama plants a seed in voter's minds that he hides behind color to play on white guilt, or do a hit job on McCain. Or simply to preempt McCain from using what some consider sneaky and insidious code words such as inexperienced, novice, and greenhorn on foreign policy issues as surrogates for race.
But Obama does have a point about the peril of race. A legion of websites has cropped up to spew non-stop borderline racist digs at Obama and his wife, Michelle. McCain has swiftly disavowed all race tinged ads, cracks, taunts against Obama as well as the New Yorker magazine cover, at least publicly. The jury is way out whether these attacks help or hurt Obama.
Meanwhile, Obama's hands aren't completely clean on the race issue. Team Obama lambasted Hillary Clinton for supposedly denigrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., made a blatant racial pitch to blacks to flood the polls in the South Carolina primary, and uses a bible thumping preacher cadence in talking to black audiences.
Then there's the curious quip that he doesn't look like all the other presidents on dollar bills. This got McCain's dander up since the obvious inference was that maybe it's time for a black to be on those bills. This is hardly a race neutral way to make the point that Republicans allegedly are using scare tactics against him.
Even while Obama and McCain cautiously tip around race, they have been fascinated and terrified by its potential to do both harm and good to their campaigns. The faintest utterance from McCain about race and Obama will bring loud, outraged shouts that McCain is playing dirty racial pool. But the reality is that at times this ploy has worked to sink black candidates who have run head to head with white candidates in more than a few state races. A racial hit even helped sink a white candidate presidential campaign; the Willie Horton hit on Michael Dukakis in 1988.
On the other hand, Obama will get reamed if he dares make a racial utterance as he did with the quip about the faces of presidents on dollar bills, or complain that he is being picked at by the GOP because he is black. The rap is that he screams racism to drum up public sympathy and votes. But the reality is that this work too. It stirs disgust and anger that Obama is being racially targeted. This was the case with the New Yorker cover.
Obama and McCain can play it as close to the vest as humanly possible and never make any allusion to, or charge about race. Yet race still will be shoved down their throats. This was virtually preordained when every media outlet made a virtual mantra of the question: Can an African-American win the presidency? There have been endless variations on that question. This imprinted the notion that race does, or at least might, matter to an awful lot of voters, black and white, but especially white voters.
Unfortunately, this has proven to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
During his hard fought Democratic primaries with Clinton, a significant percentage of whites were unabashed in saying that they wouldn't and didn't vote for Obama because of his color. Obama publicly shrugged it off with the retort that he was aware that some whites wouldn't support him because he was black but that he was confident this was a tiny minority. Privately, Team Obama worry that the number who think that way might be more than a small bigoted minority. He hedged his bet by again making an obvious racial pitch for blacks to mob the polls in November. McCain moved quickly to capitalize on the anti-Obama racial sentiment by imploring these turned off Democrats to cross over and back him. McCain never mentioned race, but race is the subtle undercurrent in their disaffection with Obama.
Obama is ever alert to race and the potential damage that it can do to his White House drive. That's why he wasted no time in accusing McCain of "injecting' race into the campaign with his racial knock against him for his dollar bill remark. It won't be the last time the two will finger point each other for a racial injection. And they'll be right about each other each time.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card
Let us look at the concept of a manufactured object versus the end-use of same object. The race card suggests a card in a deck of cards that can be played as a tactic or strategy in a game. It could and should be considered ridiculous for manufacturers of a deck of cards containing a race card to find fault with anyone who would point out the presence of the card in the deck and its use in the games that are played. This is what Barack Obama did. He stated the game that is played and the cards that are used to play it. It is in his best interest to inform the public of how the deck is stacked with cards of disrespect and divide.
Barack Obama is not a manufacturer of cards (America manufactured racial divide not Obama) but he is a student of card games and thus is aware how a joker can be dealt from the bottom of the deck to sully the quality of what otherwise is a respectful game. Since he sees being elected as a collaborative effort involving a national community of the concerned, he simply sought to remind his team of the games that are played by the other side and how they might introduce (have introduced) a card with divisive and distracting properties.
I don't think Obama played a 'race card.' He stated the obvious, thus disarming some who try to nurture those negative racial feeling that may cloud one's judgment when it comes to voting those interests. McCain's people don't want those who will use race as a litmus thus disarmed, so they are attempting to sully the waters with those assertions. Obama was also trying to gird those supporters who may be on the fence, who want to vote what they see as their interests, but might still be swayed be negative media, campaign pressures to conform and vote for the 'war hero,' by making them aware of the pressure.
"The obscure we see eventually, the completely obvious takes longer." - Edward R. Murrow
The comment about the faces on the bills wasn't curious at all. It was specifically addressing this internet ad posted by the McCain campaign on June 27th:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDTJDv4hevU
Besides, the notion that color is the key point in Obama's dollar bill statement is funny when you consider that on our currency, everyone's a strange shade of green.
Yes, sadly, there are Americans afraid of Obama because of his race. How he uses race isn't helping his problem. In fact, I'm not certain he hasn't overplayed his hand. The genie is out of the bottle; it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Halli Casser-Jayne
http://www.thecjpoliticalreport.com
Mr. Hutchinson, thank you for this piece of honest analysis. Too many people on HuffPo and in the MSM have promoted, or at least failed to denounce, the idea that the Clintons are racists. This nonsense continues even today!
The Repubs have studied how to use the race issue cleverly and cleanly in the general. They NEVER said a word about race in the controversial celebrity ad. They know that using race would be toxic for them. The ad is ultimately about experience. Obama took the bait. Rather than addressing the "thin resume" issue, he raised the race issue himself. He was fair game. Hopefully Obama learned some important lessons from this experience that will help him to run a more effective campaign and win in Nov.
The ad throws a black, male, former president of Harvard Law Review into the same category as two blond bimbos, making sure to feature all three on screen at the same time.
The McCain campaign accused Obama of "playing the race card" a day after the ad was released, using the premise of Obama's dollar-bill remark. Obama made the dollar-bill remark on Wednesday, the day the ad was released, as one item on a list of ways in which "they," meaning the opposition in general, would try to make Obama seem too risky, too different to trust with the presidency.
No one said anything about the remark all day Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, the McCain campaign was shocked by it. Although the media dutifully followed the McCain campaign in calling attention to the remark, no one outside the McCain campaign independently identified the remark as "playing the race card" for an entire day after hearing it.
I suspect the McCain campaign hoped for a more direct charge of race-baiting. However, by Thursday morning, with nothing more substantial than the dollar-bill remark, and with criticism of their attacks mounting, especially against their hospital visit ad, which was generally condemned as misleading by independent fact-checkers, they decided to go ahead with the "race card" accusation.
What do you think, Mr. Hutchinson?