The battle for the White House took a nasty turn on Thursday when John McCain accused Barack Obama of ”playing the race card”.
While race surfaced earlier this year during Obama’s contest with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, it had been absent from McCain’s fight with Obama.
McCain’s team blamed a speech made the previous day by Obama, in which the Democratic candidate claimed his Republican rival was trying to frighten voters by saying Obama had a strange name and did not look like other presidents.
Obama’s campaign team denied it had played the race card and accused McCain’s team of ”gutter-style politics” over aggressive personal ads this week.
It was not clear on Thursday night whether McCain genuinely felt he had been traduced by Obama the previous day, or whether McCain’s team is exploiting Obama’s comments to get race up and running as an issue.
The row came after a week in which McCain launched a series of personal attacks on Obama, including a TV ad on Wednesday accusing him of engaging in celebrity politics and comparing him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
Obama, seeking to become the first African-American president, was not helped by a song by Grammy award-winning rapper Ludacris endorsing him and abusing McCain, George Bush and Clinton. McCain, who has been narrowing the poll gap with Obama, has shifted from promises he made earlier this year to fight on policy not personality and to respect his opponent.
Asked on CNN if it was fair for his campaign team to accuse Obama of playing the race card, McCain replied: ”It is. I’m sorry to say that it is … there’s no place in this campaign for that.”
When told that Obama’s team had denied it, McCain replied: ”I’ll let the American people judge.”
Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said Obama had ”played the race card and played it from the bottom of the deck”. He described Obama’s comments as ”divisive, negative, shameful and wrong”.
McCain’s team pounced on Obama over a speech in Springfield, Missouri, in which he said: ”So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. 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 those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.”
Now that race is out as an issue, it is likely to remain a subtext for the remainder of the election. If many white Americans are privately racist, McCain could benefit. Alternatively, voters could take the opportunity to choose Obama to demonstrate that race is no longer a significant factor.
Race first surfaced as an issue in December in the contest between Obama and Clinton, when Obama’s team blamed Bill Clinton for bringing it up. The former president later complained that Obama had ”played the race card on me”.
On the campaign trail in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Thursday, Obama had not yet heard about the race card remark. Instead, he turned on McCain over the celebrity ad. ”So far all we have heard is Paris Hilton and Britney Spears,” he said. To cheers from the audience, he added: ”I have to ask my opponent: ‘Is that the best you can come up with?”’
Obama, who has resisted personal criticism of McCain, went on to say that such attacks would not help bring down petrol prices or address other public concerns.
Obama’s campaign team has set up a website to collate all the personal attacks, referring to it as the Low Road Express, a play on McCain’s Straightalk Express campaign bus.
Negative campaigning, while ritually denounced by politicians in public, tends to be effective. It is too early yet to see any impact in the polls, but one by Quinnipiac University, Connecticut, on Thursday showed Obama’s lead shrinking in the three battleground states: 46% to McCain’s 44% in Florida; the same in Ohio; and 49% to 42% in Pennsylvania.
Obama’s team denounced as ”outrageously offensive” the Ludacris song Politics: Obama Is Here. In it, Ludacris says: ”Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant … McCain don’t belong in any chair unless he’s paralysed. Yeah I said it ‘cos Bush is mentally handicapped.” Bill Burton, Obama’s spokesperson, said: ”As Barack Obama has said … rap lyrics too often perpetuate misogyny, materialism and degrading images that he doesn’t want his daughters or any children exposed to … While Ludacris is a talented individual, he should be ashamed of these lyrics.” – guardian.co.uk