Posted by
Armanius on Friday, August 01, 2008 8:08:18 PM
Remember when Obama first said back in June that Republicans would try to scare voters by mentioning that he is black? I gave him a pass for that, because I thought that he was pre-emptively striking any attempts by his opponents to inject race into the presidential campaign. But he has now used slight variations of this same talking point at least three more times during his campaign yesterday with the slight variations. Instead of saying the word black, Obama is now saying that Republicans will try to scare people by saying that he doesn't look like the presidents in the dollar bills.
After getting called out by the McCain campaign for playing the race card when no one in the McCain campaign has told voters not to vote for Obama because he is black, Obama's campaign manager David Axelrod said the following during NBC's "Today" show:
"Nobody reported it as a racial comment. … The only time this became an issue was when (McCain campaign manager) Rick Davis and their campaign decided to kick it up and make it a racial issue."
I suppose that all the people who heard those statements by Obama, and who immediately felt that he was playing the race card, are "nobody" in the eyes of Mr. Axelrod.
Another Obama campaign aide Robert Gibbs said that:
"He (Obama) was referring to the fact that he didn't come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race."
Then in further response to the controversy, the same Mr. Axelrod, who first accused McCain of fabricating the race controversy, says in "Good Morning America" that:
"(Obama is) not from central casting when it comes to candidates for president of the United States. He's new to Washington. Yes, he's African-American."
Now, if that is not an admission then what? Unfortunately, as mainstream media goes, the host of Good Morning America did not follow up on Mr. Axelrod's own statement that Obama was referring to race, and just moved on to commenting how Republicans are trying to "get attention." Be that as it may, Obama played the race card in June when he explicitly said the word "black." And the usage was in the exact same context as the "does not look like the presidents in dollar bills" usage that he said three separate times yesterday. Now McCain probably knows how President Clinton felt when the Obama campaign used the race card against him.