Calling the bluff on the race card

Finally! After entire states and 18millions voters have been accised of racism, someone says something about it!

McCain campaign accuses Obama of playing race card

As the Illinois Democrat campaigned in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Thursday, Republican John McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis has issued a statement saying that Obama “played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.”

Davis said that move was, as he put it, “divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

The last drop for this to finally happen was

Obama’s remark Wednesday that President Bush and McCain will resort to scare tactics. Obama said: “What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. … You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

I wish someone would have said that when the race memo was unveiled

To quote Gene Lyons

A good tactic, but a very bad strategy. Those who would have no problem seeing a black president will resent it and the actual racists won’t care.

Update with McCain comment

“All I can say is we’re proud of that commercial,” McCain said, after being asked by a voter if he was retreating from his promise of a clean campaign, according to ABC. “We think Americans need to know that I believe that we should base this campaign on what we can do for Americans at home and how we can make Americans safe and prosperous and that’s the theme of our campaign.”

Update

Politico examines race moving to the center of the campaign:

McCain aides say their goal is to pre-empt what they believe is Obama’s effort to paint any conventional campaign attacks as race-based.

Obama’s aim, in the view of the McCain camp: “to delegitimize any line of attack against him,”

And the thing I really like

Remarkably, in fact, Schmidt sees a sort of political soul mate in Bill Clinton. “Say whatever you want about Bill Clinton,” Schmidt said, “but it’s deeply unfair to suggest his criticism of Obama was race-based. President Clinton was a force for unity in this country on this subject. Every American should be proud of his record as both a governor and president. But we knew it was coming in our direction because they did it against a President of the United State of their own party.”

facing protestations that add:

“He injected this yesterday,” Schmidt said. “We are compelled to respond. Tomorrow, if he does not do it again, we will not talk about it again.”

“We will not be smeared on this subject, period.”

Update with a National Review (sorry) bit on what was ignored in the primaries

His declaration that his grandmother was a “typical white person,” was, at the time, derided primarily because it was seen as Obama “throwing her under the bus” for political expediency. But the statement’s premise — that the “typical” white person is a reflexive racist — is at least as offensive.

the second one – the “bitter” remarks:

the commentary surrounding Obama’s statement to San Francisco elites about bitter, working class voters focused largely on the condescension in his claim that such folks “cling to guns or religion.” Somewhat ignored was the clause “…or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…” Again, Obama is branding a huge swath of the American populace in unsavory terms.

Both were unguarded statements, both accuse everyone who doesn’t support him of racism, both were purposefully ignored in extremely publicized  statements. Why?

update

B0 campaign concedes that the dollar bill remark was about race

Kinda expected as other similar statements were “they’ll tell you I am black”

which begged for this