OJ, Obama, and the Race Card

Political analyst Tom Porter, who blogs intermittently at pansfricanviews.blogspot.com, was the first to mention to me the similarity in wording between McCain campaign manager Rick Davis's claim of Obama playing the race card and former O.J. Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro's post-mortem on the Simpson verdict. Davis said: "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong." Shapiro told interviewer Barbara Walters that "not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck." Pure coincidence? Perhaps. But on the theory that hardly anything in a political campaign passes without forethought or calculation, Davis' remarks are facially suspect.