Barack's Race Game

Here's an outline on how Barack's race card game works according to John Pitney at National Review Online.

On Friday, Senator Obama warned a cheering audience about the Republicans. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

You heard that one, didn't you, over the weekend? Even though Barack said it just once and the audio wasn't great - the media is all charged up and reporting the hell out of it.

A few months ago, historian Sean Wilentz dubbed this tactic the “race-baiter card.” Smear your opponents as racists, and if there’s no evidence for the claim, accuse them of using “coded language.” There is no authoritative racial codebook, so the charge is easy to lodge. The campaign need not make such accusations directly, since sympathetic writers will do so.

It's an easy game to play, since the co-conspirators are preprogrammed to be coordinated in their thinking - they don't even realize when they're dancing along.

Consider Senator Clinton’s “3 A.M.” television spot. The ad did not mention Obama. It merely said that if a crisis erupts while our kids are asleep, we need an experienced president to take the call. A race-neutral appeal, right? Not according to Professor Orlando Patterson. Noting that the ad’s sleeping children were white, he recalled the silent movie Birth of a Nation. This racist epic glorified the Klan, picturing black men as threatening and brutish. “The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.”

Just like doing a waltz, the smart people start moving to the beat.

Patterson’s charge was ridiculous. The ad was a lineal descendant of a 1968 Nixon commercial, which showed a nighttime still of the White House, along with ominous music and a voiceover saying that the president’s decisions “can affect the future of your family for generations to come.” Nixon’s opponent was Hubert Humphrey, a Norwegian American.

Remember when Barack was accused of being an elitist after he made his elitist comments in San Francisco to an elite group of donors - the 'bitter' comments?

Yet journalist David K. Shipler wrote: “‘Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.”

This "thinking" is insidious and carries great political power.

Last year, Joseph Biden got reams of bad publicity when he said that Obama is “articulate.” An article in the New York Times suggested that the word had a subtext: “articulate ... for a black person.” The writer explained: “Such a subtext is inherently offensive because it suggests that the recipient of the ‘compliment’ is notably different from other black people.”

So McCain will have to be careful in trying to utter any truths about Barack.

In the months ahead, expect similar attacks from Obama and his allies. “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he recently said. He failed to add that the knife can be imaginary.

It's one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations.

So just picture how Obama supporters would react if McCain tried various compliments.

“Barack Obama is extremely intelligent.”

McCain is hinting that black people have lower IQs than white people.

“Barack Obama is very nice.”

McCain is obviously playing to the stereotype of violent black males. He’s suggesting that most black people are anything but nice.