The WaPo’s E. J. Dionne Jr. noted in passing this morning that the McCain campaign’s strategy is “almost a parody of George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 exertions.”
At no point has this been clearer than it was yesterday.
I had an idea as to how I’d characterize yesterday’s events, but it looks like Time’s Michael Scherer already captured the landscape perfectly.
First Obama says something he has said before, in various forms: “Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. 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 the dollar bills.”
Second, the McCain campaign jumped on that statement: “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”
Third, and just moments ago, the Obama campaign clarified its candidate’s initial remarks: “Barack Obama in no way believes that the McCain campaign is using race as an issue, but he does believe they’re using the same old low-road politics to distract voters from the real issues in this campaign, and those are the issues he’ll continue to talk about.”
Okay. So let’s move on.
Exactly. That’s the whole story, start to finish. Obama made a casual joke, McCain felt like he’d been accused of racism, so Obama said he wasn’t accusing McCain of racism. That’s it. There’s nothing else to talk about. Move along; there’s nothing to see here.
If only it were that simple. The McCain campaign is so desperate to avoid a substantive debate, so anxious to abandon any sense of propriety, so reckless in dealing with sensitive issues in an irresponsible way, this gang has proceeded to play the race card by accusing Obama of playing the race card.
And the media couldn’t be more pleased with its new chew-toy.
Greg Sargent summarized the tactic very well:
One more time: The party playing the “race card” today is the McCain campaign. It’s a very clever ruse. The McCain camp is desperate to undercut Obama’s image as a racial uniter, as a figure who has moved beyond the racial battles of past. As Ben Smith noted today, this is central to Obama’s appeal.
The real goal of McCain’s accusation is to evoke memories of a more-confrontational racial politics that defined an older generation of African American leaders, thus undercutting Obama’s image as a kind of transcendent figure who doesn’t bear the scars of past battles and can thus effect real change.
It’s true that Obama to some degree gave McCain an opening to do this with his remark about looking different from past presidents on one-dollar and five-dollar bills. But let’s get real: The party that doubled-down on race today is the McCain campaign — even as it pretends to be the victim here. It’s that simple.
It is, indeed. As Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) explained, after hearing McCain’s latest attack, “It’s ridiculous, it’s offensive and you have to wonder if there is a double motive for it.”
Of course there’s a double motive for it. The McCain campaign wasn’t offended by a harmless remark Obama has made many times before; the McCain campaign wanted to inject race into the presidential campaign.
As the NYT reported on its front page:
With his rejoinder about playing “the race card,” [McCain campaign manager Rick] Davis effectively assured that race would once again become an unavoidable issue as voters face an election in which, for the first time, one of the major parties’ nominees is African-American.
And with its criticism, the McCain campaign was ensuring that Mr. Obama’s race — he is the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas — would again be a factor in coverage of the presidential race. On Thursday, it took the spotlight from Mr. Obama when he had sought to attack Mr. McCain on energy issues.
Imagine that, John McCain would rather inject racial talk into the presidential campaign than deal with a substantive debate over energy policy. And the media would much prefer to obsess over the prior, and ignore the latter. Who could’ve guessed?
Steve Schmidt told the Politico, “[Obama] injected this yesterday. We are compelled to respond. Tomorrow, if he does not do it again, we will not talk about it again.”
And since Schmidt and the rest of the McCain gang have proven to be paragons of class and honesty, there’s no reason to question his word, right?