The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

John's Race Card Question

Evidence today of the persistent nature of the significance of race in the campaign: The percentage of young people who say they're unwilling to vote for a black candidate is 22 percent, according to one poll, and not dropping. Get it together, 18- to 29-year-olds! But Obama's comment is still problematic. He raised race not in terms of voters' attitudes, but in terms of Bush and McCain's—when, John as you say, they haven't given him call to. I suppose the Obama camp could argue that McCain's supporters are doing it for him. But the ellision seems like a bad idea. For one thing, if McCain is going to be accused of race-baiting whether he actually does it or not, doesn't that give him less incentive to muzzle the 527s that might do this? And for another, we expect Obama to be America's leading sensitive spokesman on racial politics. If he's careless about who he tags as a bigot, that gives the rest of us license to be.

Is Obama Playing the Race Card?

A guest post from Slate's John Dickerson:

"Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," Obama said this week. "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 the dollar bills."

I'll give Obama "scared," and he's got a good case on the patriotism charge, too, but race? Wouldn't the world have gone nuts if Hillary had said something similar about being a woman? They would have said she's playing the gender card. Despite the reckless McCain attacks, about which I've already written, there's no evidence that he's ever made Obama's race an issue. In fact, he's done the opposite -- he called out one of his supporters for doing so at a public event. Immediately, without it becoming a flap. McCain's "black" daughter (she's actually Bangladeshi), we also might remember, was used in an attack against him. So, why isn't Obama going too far here? I suppose one response is that if McCain can completely make up things about Obama then Obama can make up things about McCain. Of course, yelling racism is taking it one step beyond making up his positions on oil, energy taxes, and his visit to the troops in Germany.