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.

Playing the Race Card

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, on the McCain campaign's charges of Obama playing the race card, writes, "it’s frustrating to watch John McCain calling out Barack Obama on race. Senator Obama has spoken more honestly and thoughtfully about race than any other politician in many years. Senator McCain is the head of a party that has viciously exploited race for political gain for decades." Indeed, the Republican Party has come to power by its cynical use of race since the days of Richard Milhous Nixon's Southern Strategy. Apparently old habits are difficult to abandon.