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The week in race in politics was a wild one with John McCain accusing Barack Obama of using race as a wedge issue and Obama continuing to deal with insinuations that he is both too black and not black enough.
McCain kicked off the week by reversing his previous view of Ward Connerly backed anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, coming out in support of Arizona's current attempt to ban affirmative action. This caused Huffington Post blogger, Seth Colter Walls, to ask: "Has John McCain started to aggressively court the white vote?" Could this be the start of McCain's southern strategy?
The twin engines of racial resentment and isolationist sentiment may exist for McCain to power up this year as well, with immigration and high gas prices both serving as hot political topics. And just because the code words of Nixon's Southern Strategy -- busing and "states' rights" -- no longer exist today, that doesn't mean there aren't still votes to be gained by finding some new ones.
Political commentators are also calling out McCain's line of attack calling Obama "presumptuous" as code for "uppity."
However, it is hard not to see in the ongoing attitude towards this presidential frontrunner, just three months before the election, something more uncomfortable that is not simply a matter of age, but one of race. Read entire post here
On Sunday, longtime Washington hand David Gergen took umbrage with John McCain's recent attack ads, charging that the Senator was using coded messaging to paint Barack Obama as "outside the mainstream" and "uppity."
"There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, 'he's not one of us,'" said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. "I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'I'm against quotas,' we get what that's about." Read entire article here
McCain attempted to deflect those charges onto Obama by accusing him of "playing the 'race card'"
Jaelithe of the MOMocrats was at one of the Missouri events where Obama made comments similar to the ones McCain complained about and she shares the audience reaction:
It was that last sentence the McCain campaign took issue with: "And he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills."
Let me tell you how the overwhelmingly white, rural, working-class audience in Union reacted to that statement:
They laughed.
And I don't mean they twittered a little uncomfortably, or laughed politely. I mean, they laughed. From the belly. They guffawed. They applauded. If you don't believe me, watch the video I posted in my last piece. It was one of the best-received lines in Obama's whole speech.
Why?
Because the joke— it was a joke, you see— he delivered the line with a wry grin— succeeded in the way that many of the best jokes do, by sneaking up to the edge of an unspoken, considered-unspeakable controversy, and tearing away its respectable mask.... Anyone with critical thinking ability and a reasonable understanding of racial dynamics in this country who has really been paying attention to the attacks made on Obama by conservatives during the course of this campaign could tell you this:... all of these attempts by the Right and by certain members of the media to characterize Obama as somehow other and foreign— have served as a convenient, socially acceptable stand-in mode of criticism for certain people in this country who would like to say, but cannot for fear of losing all credibility in today's politically correct world:
He's black. We're not. And that scares us.
The genius of Obama's joke about the faces on American money is that it acknowledges this reality— the reality that some people are uneasy about his race, and that others are willing to exploit that uneasiness— without specifically casting blame. There he stands, in front of an audience of salt-of-the-earth, rural white folks, and he self-deprecatingly mocks his "funny name." (Which, incidentally, I've been hearing him do in speeches since, oh, pretty much since he started running