Barack Obama is starting to make a dirty habit out of playing the race card during this presidential campaign.
As noted over at Politico.com at Jonathan Martin's Blog [2], Obama made comments while campaigning yesterday in Missouri, which were obviously thinly-veiled accusations that the McCain campaign and the Republican Party are using, or are going to use, race in their strategy to defeat the junior senator from Illinois. Obama stated:
"What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."
When pressed on the issue, the Obama campaign put out a denial about their candidate's intent:
An Obama spokesman denied that the line about "dollar bills" was
related to the Democrat's race and the campaign said today that they
don't believe McCain is using the race issue. Obama aides didn't
directly respond to the accusation that their candidate was doing the
same.
Hmm... So Obama was really just trying to say that the McCain '08 campaign has intentions of using the fact that Obama doesn't wear pouffy-collared shirts and powdered wigs against him? Gotcha...
Obama Press Secretary Bill Burton went on to say the following:
"Barack Obama in no way believes that the McCain campaign is using race as an issue, but he does believe they're using the same old low-road politics to distract voters from the real issues in this campaign, and those are the issues he'll continue to talk about."
If that's the message coming from Obama's campaign staff, they need to do some serious work on getting their messages coordinated with the candidate himself. It was just over a month ago, June 20th, while campaigning in Jacksonville, Florida, that Obama levied this previous charge of racism against the Republican Party and the McCain Campaign:
"It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their
stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid. They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and
inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"
Once again, just what was the comment made today by Obama's press secretary? Seems it was something akin to... "Barack Obama in no way believes that the McCain campaign is using race as an issue"?
