He writes:
Michael Grunwald at Time: “Race is the elephant in the room.” I dunno. Looking at this pile of an article, I’d say the room is full of warmed-over primary bullshit:
On a swing through Pennsylvania last month, John McCain visited a Manheim Central High School football practice — not to ingratiate himself with the players, who weren’t even old enough to vote, but to identify himself with the gritty, down-home, lunch-bucket values of small-town football. “This is a blue-collar town,” Manheim’s coach said in his introduction of McCain. “We don’t have a lot of flashy athletes. We don’t come out with a lot of flash.” But the coach explained that his team works hard, plays with discipline and comes through in the end. “A lot like John McCain,” he said.
If you’re familiar with the code words of the sports world, you’ve probably already guessed that Manheim’s players had something else in common with McCain: they were white. On the other hand, athletes who are described as “flashy” almost invariably have something in common with Barack Obama. I’m not saying the coach was trying to inject race into his discussion of flashiness. I’m saying that sometimes we talk about race even when we’re not talking about race — in presidential politics as well as sports.
OK, so it’s not about race, however, for purposes of argument, we’ll make it about race.
Race is the elephant in the room of the 2008 campaign. In West Virginia’s primary, one out of every four Hillary Clinton voters actually admitted to pollsters that race was a factor in their vote; that may be an Appalachian outlier, but even in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio the figure was a troubling 1 in 10.
Right. Those figures again. As usual, somewhat lacking in context and detail. They work better that way. Apparently not so troubling that large numbers of Obama voters cited race, or that the race concerns cited may well, polling suggests, have been about racism rattling around in Obama’s closet.
This part is good.
This is touchy stuff, partly because “the race card” is not always, so to speak, a black-and-white issue. New York governor David Paterson recently accused Republicans of using “community organizer” as a subtle racial put-down; that seems hypersensitive to the point of paranoia. Obama was a community organizer, and his opponents should be able to criticize him without being accused of race baiting. But it’s tricky when the attacks wander into the neighborhood of racial stereotypes, like the McCain “Celebrity” ad linking Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, which had a whiff of lock-up-your-women alarmism about the sexual power of black men.
That’s odd. I thought the idea he was all glitz, no substance just like Brits and Paris, not that he wanted to date them. Or have them bring him home to dinner.
The usually somnolent David Gergen lashed out at McCain’s ad portraying Obama as
the Messiah, calling it a subtle but intentional effort to paint a black man as The Other.
Whatever the Messiah might have actually looked like, I’m pretty sure most Christian Americans think Jesus was a blue-eyed white guy with shoulder length brown hair. Jewish Americans, who don’t think he’s arrrived yet, probably think he’s going to look … Jewish. “The Other” only works if you’re an idol-worpshipping pagan. Or a Muslim, maybe. Odd thing for Gergen to say. I have taken the “Messiah” references, which I’ve also made, as an effort to cast Obama as someone whose apostles and acolytes and camp followers think he walks on water and who is promising to miraculously transform this wretched, benighted, much-abused nation of ours into a golden city on a hill, with lots of loaves and fishes.
There's more...go read the rest. You won't be dissapointed.
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