Now we have the McCain camp accusing Obama of "playing the race card... from the bottom of the deck," in response to Obama's most recent statement about not looking like past presidents. But that's presumably only one card in said deck, that could have by implication been played from the top of the deck. We have yet to identify the other cards in the deck. Maybe these include the religion card, the security card, the reverse-racism card, the earmark card, the soft-on-terrorism card, the pandering-card, the health-care-for-all card....Pick a card! Any card! Bring back the New Deal as a slogan.
If the point is that Obama is seeking advantage because his father was black -- or that he'd become the first African-American president even though he's really Paris Hilton -- that raises a whole bunch of questions about how much there is in the pot and who is bidding how much.
Context, from the Washington Post:
"So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," Obama told voters in Springfield. "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 those dollar bills, you know. He's risky. That's essentially the argument they're making."
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis countered this morning with a terse but harsh 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."
Fuller accounts are here, here, and here.
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