McCain and Race Baiting

Real Clear Politics posted October 17 an excellent opinion article by columnist Charles Krauthammer about the playing of the "race card" in the presidential campaign between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. I have argued before that while McCain is often accused of injecting race into the election, it is in fact Democrats, supporters of Obama, and Obama himself who consistently raise race as an issue.

Krauthammer, in "Who's Playing the Race Card," writes what has become obvious to all but those engaging in blind support for Barack Obama. A couple of people, out of tens of thousands at rallies all across the country, make inappropriate remarks about race and McCain is found guilty by association (association with complete strangers) of race baiting. But the mere mention of actual Obama associations such as Jeremiah Wright and ACORN are off limits because they are racist. Ridiculous. Krauthammer even notes that the one time McCain personally heard a racist comment, he chastised the guy. The left's response? McCain is a racist using "code words" and "innuendo." He is the equivalent of George Wallace.

"What makes the charges against McCain especially revolting," Krauthammer says, "is that he has been scrupulous in eschewing the race card. He has gone far beyond what is right and necessary, refusing even to make an issue of Obama's deep, self-declared connection with the race-baiting Jeremiah Wright."

Having chosen to put Wright off-limits for his Republican supporters, Krauthammer says, "It is simply Orwellian for him to be now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism. What makes it doubly Orwellian is that these charges are being made on behalf of the one presidential candidate who has repeatedly, and indeed quite brilliantly, deployed the race card."

How has Obama played the race card, you may ask? Krauthammer writes, "The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a racist....If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can."

Obama has done the same to McCain. As Krauthammer notes, Obama himself has warned voters that Bush and McCain would try to scare them because he was different, with a funny name, and didn't look like the other presidents. Yet McCain has never tried that tactic. "When asked at the time to produce one instance of McCain deploying race," Krauthammer writes, "the Obama campaign could not. Yet here was Obama firing a pre-emptive charge of racism against a man who had not indulged in it."

And this is the great irony. Obama and his supporters, from Ed Rendell to Kathleen Sebelius to Gregory Meeks to John Lewis, have consistently charged McCain with race-baiting, without a shred of evidence to back up the claim. "What makes this all the more dismaying," Krauthammer says, "is that it comes from Barack Obama, who has consistently presented himself as a healer, a man of a new generation above and beyond race, the man who would turn the page on the guilt-tripping grievance politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I once believed him."

I didn't.