2008 Election

A Rare Greivance With Barackstar

There was a lot of talk about “playing the race card” today, which is a phrase I’ve always found particularly irritating. It is all too often used as buzz-word kill when someone is trying to have a legitimate conversation about inequality, which is exactly what Barack Obama was doing when he said this to a crowd in Springfield, MO:

“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,” Obama said. “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.’”

Of course McCain & Co. are doing this. That’s why he held an event at a German restaurant spouting jingoistic drivel last week while Obama was out inspiring the world. Yet when McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, accused the BO camp of playing the race card “from the bottom of the deck” in a “divisive, negative, shameful and wrong” way, the response was Bill Clintonesque in its bold-faced denial, claiming that his comment about the dollar bills referred to experience and not skin color. Strategist Robert Gibbs said:

“What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington … There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

That’s just absolute bullshit, and I’m not sure who they think is going to believe it.

Barackstar should definitely underscore and address blatant racism towards him, and he should be proud to acknowledge it when he does take the opportunity to be candid and honest about the state of race relations in America. If not for the good of humanity, then at least so that Shelby Steele will have to eat his naysayer words! I wish BO would do more of it. I was waiting back in West Virginia and Kentucky when HRC started trumpeting her appeal to the hordes of low-income, white voters who would identify more with her candidacy.

I can only imagine how this is going to play out in debate season against the man who will always hate the “gooks.”

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