BY accusing Barack Obama of playing the race card, John McCain hopes to shuffle the deck in a White House campaign that is scarcely begun, much less settled. In so doing, the Republican made at least two political calculations. He risked at least temporarily overshadowing a tough ad his campaign had unleashed depicting Obama as a celebrity in the Paris Hilton mold. And by challenging Obama directly, he chose a course that Hillary Rodham Clinton shied away from in her losing campaign for the Democratic nomination, presenting the most serious black presidential candidate in history with a charge he could not let go unanswered. At first glance it was an innocuous reference to a well-known fact: Obama, whose father was Kenyan and mother a white American, would be the first black president in US history and would thus look different from his predecessors. But in the charged context of the election it provoked an immediate reaction. McCain said that by falsely presenting him as racist, Obama was shamelessly employing an underhand tactic to appeal for votes. Political commentator Terry Madonna said Obama's remark distracted attention from his core aim of convincing voters he was best equipped to handle issues such as rising gas prices, the home mortgage crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don't think he (Obama) did himself any good with these comments. What he did ... is inject back into this context the idea about (voters') ... comfort level,” said Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. “What he said is not exactly rap talk, black speak, but that is something that Obama has to be very careful about. He just can't let people believe that they can't trust him.” “I think his comments were clearly the race card,” McCain said Friday. Obama, locked in a close contest with Republican McCain to succeed President George W. Bush in the Nov. 4 election, called that ridiculous. “What I said in front of a 98 percent conservative, rural, white audience in Missouri is nothing that I haven't said before,” he insisted. Whether the exchange turns out to benefit McCain, or Obama, or turns out to be nothing more than a fleeting midsummer controversy, the episode is a fresh reminder that race is often a wild card in political campaigns. No less a politician than Bill Clinton learned that lesson last winter when he sparked anger among some black leaders who said he had disparaged Obama's victory in the South Carolina primary. The former president's offending remark was that Jesse Jackson, a civil rights leader who was a longshot presidential candidate in the 1980s, carried the state 20 years earlier. So, too, Greg Davis of Mississippi, the losing Republican candidate in a House race in May. Running against Democrat Travis Childers, he ran an ad that showed Obama's controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It was an unsubtle - and unsuccessful - attempt to make Childers guilty by association with a black candidate and his fiery minister. “That didn't work so well,” Obama said with a smile in a recent interview with The Associated Press. Point taken by Republicans, no doubt. Now it's Obama's turn to try to fend off the charge, leveled after he sought to push back against a stinging new ad that derided him as a mere celebrity at a time when the nation needs a leader. The dispute began when Obama, responding to a critical ad by McCain, said his rival was trying to scare voters by pointing out he had a funny name and he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five-dollar bills. “What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said in Missouri on Wednesday in a mocking tone. “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.” He didn't explain what he meant about “those other presidents,” George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and the rest, who have in common only that they were white and dead. After brief internal debate, McCain's campaign manager jumped. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong,” said Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager. “I'm disappointed that Senator Obama would say the things he's saying,” the candidate added in Racine, Wisconsin. “Barack Obama never called John McCain a racist,” the Democrat's top strategist, David Axelrod, countered on Friday on “The Early Show” on CBS. “What Barack Obama was saying is he's not exactly from Central Casting for presidential candidates.” If there were a central casting, it's a fair bet that neither McCain nor Obama would have gotten this far in the race for the White House. One is 71, white and a veteran of Washington who has spent years developing an independent political persona in a party that usually rewards down-the-line orthodoxy. The other is black, running for the presidency of a country founded by slave owners and bedeviled by race throughout its history. In the modern era, neither party has been racially pure. Democrats locked in generations of support in the South because they favored an end to Reconstruction - the period after the 1860s US Civil War when the federal government began to restructure the war-torn South and pushed racial equality reforms in the pro-slavery region. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal depended as much on the votes of Southern, white supremacist lawmakers as it did on northern liberals. Gradually, political calculations changed, and President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, said famously he was delivering the South to the Republicans when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Four years later, Richard Nixon, a Republican, won the White House with a so-called Southern strategy that played on white anger with racial integration. In 1990, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms won re-election in North Carolina with an ad showing a close-up of two white hands crumpling a letter. “You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority,” said the narrator. It's not an appeal that would ever come from McCain - who spoke movingly of Martin Luther King Jr. in May at the site of the civil rights leader's assassination in Memphis. Racial politics has changed among Democrats, as well, in the generation since Jackson was running for president with an appeal aimed almost exclusively at blacks. “The hands that once picked cotton can now pick a president,” was one of his memorable mantras. That's not a phrase that's ever going to pass Obama's lips as he urges Americans to overcome their doubts about him. Instead, he hopes to quietly register millions of new black voters, and put a few of those Southern states in play that have voted Republican for a generation. No African American has ever been elected to the White House and in a country where memories of racial strife and discrimination against the minority are still fresh, Obama must work harder to overcome his doubters, they said on Friday. The dispute over whether Obama has played the “race card” won't swing the election, but could make it harder for voters to trust him, analysts said. References to the Democratic senator's race, if they are seen as clumsy, do not help Obama make the case that he is the most reliable choice to lead the country as it struggles with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an ailing economy. In an interview with National Public Radio on Friday, Obama said he did not believe that the McCain campaign had “targeted race issues.” He added, however: “I will say that the way that they've amplified this, you know, has been troublesome. And the eagerness with which they've done it indicates they think they can exploit this politically. “But, in fact, what I have said, and there's no doubt about this, they've said it themselves, is that they want to make me appear risky to the American people.” Obama has campaigned on a platform of change but that carries risks because many voters are nervous about the direction he would take the country, said Robert Oldendick, a politics professor at the University of South Carolina. “Because (Obama) has had less than one term in the Senate and people don't know much about him and he is different in terms of race, there will be some Americans who are uncertain about the kind of change he is offering,” he said. Obama addressed that issue in the NPR interview. “Our job is to make sure that they understand that the changes we're promoting are changes that have to be made, that if we don't make them, in fact, that's the riskier course,” he said. In previous elections, fears about African Americans have been used to sway white voters against both black and white candidates. An ad in 1988 about a black convicted murderer was credited with helping Republican President George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, get elected by convincing white voters that his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis was soft on black criminals. Obama's status as the first black candidate of a major party has made race a particularly delicate issue in this election and this week's dispute showed it was a “minefield” for both candidates, said commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson. For some voters, the fact he has a serious chance of becoming president shows America has moved beyond its history of slavery, racial segregation and disenfranchisement of many black voters, said Hutchinson, author of a book on race and US presidential elections. At the same time, polls during the primary campaign to choose party candidates showed a significant number of white, working class voters in key states like Pennsylvania saying race was a factor in their decision not to vote for Obama. – Agencies __
