by Demophilus
A day after Democratic candidate Barack Obama warned that Republican rival John McCain would to tell voters "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills," McCain's campaign on Thursday accused Obama of playing racial politics.
[snip]
Stumping in Missouri, Obama, the first black candidate with a shot at winning the White House, argued Wednesday that President Bush and McCain will resort to scare tactics to maintain their hold on the White House because they have little else to offer voters.
"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. "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.'"
Obama himself didn't make clear what distinctions he thinks McCain is likely to raise regarding the presidents on U.S. currency - white men who for the most part were much older than Obama when elected. McCain has not raised Obama's race as an issue in the campaign; he has said Obama lacks experience.
Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the senator was not referring to race.
"What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn't get here after spending decades in Washington," Gibbs said. "There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn't come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race."
This is stunningly idiotic. Does Obama, or his spokesman, take us to be so lacking in judgment and intelligence that we do not know he, in fact, was talking about race? What else even vaguely make sense here?
They want us to believe that Obama was referring to the fact that "he didn't get here after spending decades in Washington." As opposed to everyone else on our currency? Let's review.
On the one dollar bill, we have George Washington. Because Washington actually chose the site for the city, which was named in his honor, it was impossible for him to have spent "decades" in Washington before coming to power. Since, as it were, the city didn't exist. You can't spend decades in a non-existent place. And as our first president, he simply couldn't have spent decades working for the government of a country that did not yet exist.
On the five dollar bill, we have Abraham Lincoln. Do I need to explain this? Lincoln, whatever he was before becoming president, was not a Washington insider. He certainly did not become president after "spending decades in Washington."
On the ten dollar bill, we have Alexander Hamilton. Who was never president.
On the twenty dollar bill, we have Andrew Jackson. Now things become slightly more complicated -- yes, Jackson served in the House of Representatives and briefly in the U.S. Senate. But we know him as a product of the frontier, an outsider, a "man of the people." At the least he didn't spend "decades" in Washington.
On the fifty dollar bill, we have Ulysses Grant. We know what he did before becoming President.
On the one hundred dollar bill, we have Benjamin Franklin. Who was never president.
So, obviously, Obama and his spokesman are just making this up as they go along. Perhaps his comment really wasn't about race, but the explanation they gave really makes no sense. Even a very minimal knowledge of history shows them to be wrong. I think its fair to say that it won't really help Obama win "working class whites" by playing the race card, perhaps implying that those who don't vote for him do so for unsavory reasons, then just pulling stupid excuses out of thin air to cover up for it, ones that have zero connection to historical reality.
Of course it was about race. Nobody realistically thinks it wasn't about race. Obama was, you could say, playing the race card, because he's most likely correct that McCain will imply that he's not the man for the job because he doesn't look like all the other presidents on the dollar bills. It's legitimate because it's true, but unfortunately making reference to race has been made taboo for a variety of (somewhat valid) reasons, so the campaign staff has to blow it off.
Posted by: Adam Stempel | July 31, 2008 at 10:31 PM
So it was about race. The problem, of course, is that conservatives have so poisoned the well of racial dialogue that it is unthinkable that a black man could actually make an accusation of racially insensitive behavior. We've arrived at a place where accusing someone of racism is a worse sin than saying something racist, and posts like this only reinforce that notion.
Posted by: Freddie | July 31, 2008 at 10:59 PM