I hope it does make news.

It's a huge pile of dog shit at this point.

This is just utter and total bullshit.

Obama says "They're trying to make me look risky".

Josh Marshall and Atrios ponder aloud about the McCain commercial featuring Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton, and whether there were racist undertones to it.

24 hours later, it's Obama who's playing the race card.

The state of political commentary is appalling.

Utter and complete total bullshit.

I smell another desperation from McCain's campaign courtesy of Jake Tapper and Matt Drudge.

Jake lead with the story yesterday and it became a McCain's talking point today.

The media want a close race but McCain has no credible argument. The only way the media can keep their ratings up is to come up with silly stuff. The economy grew at 1.9% but the McCain campaign will not focus on that.

Let see what Jake Tapper report today, after all, Dana Milbank has helped inject Rove's message into MSM.

If McCain had said "Obama doesn't look like the Presidents you see on your dollar bills" would any of you claiming Barack's innocence now have given McCain any benefit of the doubt that he wasn't talking about race AND would have accepted Gibbs explanation as if it came from Tucker Bounds mouth?

Folks, I won't worry about this new media & McCain's narratives at all. The better they get the race question out there the better it is for Obama.

Obama will end up winning the argument and the media will be made stupid.

Oh, and what was the image dissolving from Britney Spears and Paris Hilton into Obama all about? Wasn't it another typical Republican "Call me, Harold" message, though a little more subtle and subliminal than the crude attack ad mounted against Harold Ford in Tennessee in 2006 or the Willie Horton ad from 1988?

This is classic Rovian gutter game-playing. Why isn't the MSM commentariat deconstructing the obvious racism of McCain's "celebrity" attack ad, which is clearly intended to paint the image and send the message:

Yikes! This uppity black guy is going after our'n sexy white wimmen! They want him instead of me!

Republicans know that this technique not only will solidify the Republican Base of racists, bigots, xenophobes, jingoists, and science-denying ignoramuses, it historically has also worked with low information, politically disengaged swing voters.

Team Obama needs not merely to play rope-a-dope with joking responses. It needs to go on offensive against these classic Rovian smear techniques.

Always the highroad for Senator McCan't.

Obama *is* referencing race when he refers to how different he looks from those vaunted figures gracing our currency.

And you know what? There's not a goddamn thing wrong with pointing it out, either.

Barack is the first African American candidate for President, and if you don't think the RNC and the McCain campaign haven't been whistling dixie about that then you haven't been listening.

Josh pointed out the similarities between the Spears and Hilton ad and the ads attacking Harold Ford in Tennessee. This is not accidental. Digby wrote a great piece the other day about dog whistles, and this is clearly one of them.

It's not racist to point out that your opponent is going to use Obama's exotic appearance and name against him.

It's no surprise, either that McCain is going to accuse Obama of using the "race card".

It just gets better and better...

Accusing someone of playing the race card also counts as playing the race card. It's not a one way thing.

Anyway, man the McCain campaign is just embarrassing.

I want to hear a 72 year old man talk about race and not be offensive.

I am surprised McCain's guy walked into the racial minefield. I don't see how bringing it up hurts Obama. I mean are there Obama supporters out there who are going to suddenly say "Oh shit, he's black!" By walking into it, McCain's guy is reinforcing the notion that the Britney and Paris ad were both about some kind of racial dog whistle. That could turn off independents who were otherwise leaning to McCain.

McCain needs to fire his campaign staff again and start over with professionals.

This attitude can only hurt McCain. They have cried Wolf one time too many this news period(June-July). They have cried wolf, just one time too many. they have turned their candidate into a cassandra sans-foresight.
As the old man said; "There they go again", if they can't tell the truth just make it up.

McCain has officially become Hillary 2.0.

So are all of y'all from up North such that you don't recognize that this denunciation is the inevitable follow up of the candidate who's blown the the racial dogwhistle?

I blogged about this back during the meanest, most overheated, part of the the primaries. I'm not going to link to that post, becuase the last damn thing I want to do is stir up old fights with my fellow travellers.

But I will quote myself, (albeit while shamelessly taking the opportunity to correct a few typos in the original):

I've lived in the South, or the border South, my whole life and I'm old enough to remember the bad old days when white supremacy was mainstream political thought. I've lived through the days when racial politics transitioned from fire hoses and bullets and George Wallace screaming "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever" to Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," Ronald Reagan's speechifying about "states rights" in Philedelphia, Mississippi and Jesse Helms "white hands" ad. (God, I'll never forget how utterly appalled I was by that ad and that whole campaign. In the waning days of the Bush I Administration, I thought the country was past that sort of thing. Now that was naïve.)

I'm a white guy, but I know the politics of racial dog whistling when I see it.

The racial dog whistle isn't directed to the people who have swastika tattoos and Klan robes in their closet. It is directed to the angry blue collar white guy who starts all his pronouncements with "I'm no racist, but . . ." and then goes on and on and on about "them" and how "they" act. People who know they're getting a raw deal and need a scapegoat. People who genuinely think it would be profoundly foul and offensive to call a black person "nigger" to his or her face but see nothing wrong with using the word in private conversations with other white people.

I've seen that tune oh-so-skillfully played in a wistful minor key by Jesse Helms and the other Republicans in North Carolina for more than two decades. Mostly, its all about a wink and a nod, a codeword here and a subtle image there and all to convey a simple message: "those blacks are privileged and getting special treatment and stealing your tax money and it just ain't fair." And you quickly learn that when its time to get blunt and say something really foul, they always trot out a black man to say it for them.

The inevitable protestation of complete innocence is the most sickening part of the act. In every case, when someone calls bullshit, the candidate pulls his halo and his best wounded expression out of his desk and sorrowfully bemoans the way his opponent makes everything about race (but, you know, that's how those people are, idn't it? Everything's always a racial thing with them).

And yes, in that same post, I noted how the "empty suit" meme is, in itself, a racial dog whistle--

At another level, however, it is a far fouler, appeal to the prejudices of, say people in a state where the demographics trend white, blue collar and older than just about anywhere else in the nation, than anyone seems to have appreciated, one narrowly targeted to get them to apply their prejudices specifically to Obama.

Barack Obama is a staggeringly accomplished man. Merely to describe his accomplishments makes one sound like a drooling star-struck Kool Aid drinker with a Chris Matthews style man crush. Obama got his B.A. from Columbia, majoring in political science with an emphasis in international relations. He was a community organizer in his twenties who, among other things, was behind a remarkably successful voter registration drive in Chicago. He received his J.D. From Harvard Law, Magna Cum Laude. He was research assistant to Lawrence Tribe, who called him "the most all-around impressive student I had seen in decades." While working for Tribe “Obama analyzed and integrated Einstein's theory of relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as well as the concept of curved space as an alternative to gravity, for a Law Review article that Tribe wrote titled, 'The Curvature of Constitutional Space.'” In his third year, Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he eschewed the incredibly lucrative job offers that await presidents of the HLR, and, instead, went to work with a respected, but small and not very remunerative, civil rights firm in Chicago. He also taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago and, it is said, could have had been full professor any time he wanted, had he not chosen to also pursue a political career. He had a meteoric rise from state senator to U.S. Senator to Presidential candidate. He is the author, the actual author, not some pol claiming credit for the work of a ghost author, of of two best selling books. Both of his books are extremely well written, the first a remarkably insightful memoir, the latter a cogent synthesis of recent events and our political and economic history that lucidly explains where we are, how we got here and what we can do about it. Chock full of policy precriptions, wonky yet readable and remarkably self-reflective.

As a senator, he has sponsored some very serious signature pieces of legislation and gotten them passed while he was a member of the minority. And, oh yes, the guy happens to be the most outstanding political orator of his generation, and may be one of the four or five best in the history of the party. He has created and run a tight, well-run and remarkable harmonious campaign organization that has upended the carefully laid plans of the Mighty and Inevitable Hillary Clinton Machine and run up huge margins against her in, what, fifteen out of the last seventeen states now?

Was he fast tracked by the powers that be in the Illinois legislature and by the Democratic Senate leadership? You bet he was. That's what organizations do with prodigies. Businesses do it, universities do it, the military does it and, yes, they do it in politics.

And yet . . . over and over again, you see him dismissed as “an empty suit.” . . . Empty suit. Pretty speeches and no content. Just a vacuous, content-free pretty boy.

Do you really think anyone would buy that drivel if he were white? . . . “Accomplishments? C'mon, he's a moulie. Columbia? Affirmative action. Harvard? Quota baby. President of the Harvard Law Review? Just a bunch of northeastern liberals exorcising their white guilt. University of Chicago? Reverse racism. Illinois legislature? Blacks takin' care of their own. Senate? Affirmative action. You know how it is today. Those blacks get everything, and us whites get the short end, know what I'm sayin'?”

The MSM can, and will, pretend not to get it. And, indeed, given that most of them seem to have a form of brain damage that causes them to forget anything that happened more than two weeks ago, some of them actually might not get it. They're sheep who are endlessly startled by things they see every day of their banal lives.

Regardless of whether you believed it was happening then, it is unmistakably happening now, and that fact that its happening was almost pathetic in its predicability once the Rovelettes took over McCain's campaign.

haha, off-topic but hilarious.

TV critic James Poniewozik:

You can make Obama into Britney Spears, or John Kerry, or Malcolm X. I'm not sure you can make him into all three at the same time. (Is there a template in American culture for an Ivy-league-snob, black-militant, out-of-control former Mouseketeer?)

You know Ben Franklin wasn't a president, but is one of my favorite bills.

That out of the way, I think it is weird to claim that saying, I don't look like other presidents on our money isn'y about race. I can't imagine what else was meant by this.

That being said, Obama is not the first to bring up race.

That dollar comment had nothing to do with race, unless you interpret it that way.

And if you do, then it is you who is playing the race card.

Yes Greg, the McCain statement will make news because this is their "excuse" statement. They will now claim (as false as it is)that "because" Obama played the race card, race if fair game.

They know that they cannot win unless they make sure the "issues" in the campaign are personal issues---personal issues about Obama not McCain. The number one issue that works in their favor is race: even if the discussion has negative blowback for them in the short run. Why? Because as long as race is foremost in the minds of enough voters (not all, just enough) then McCain has a chance to win based solely on the probability that there are enough white voters out there who they can scare or infuse with some reservations about voting for a black vs a white man.

And yes, the corporate press can be counted on to cover every such statement.

While Obama is correct, he probably shouldn't have gone there, since the topic hadn't come up in an overt way and Obama can't point to a specific ad or statement that illustrates what he is talking about.

Obama isn't guilty of playing the race card, so much as bringing up a topic that is off topic, when he should be going after McCain on domestic policy issues.

He needs to spend some real time with blue collar people in states like Ohio and PA. And a visit to the flood area of Missouri, would probably be a good idea. Man of the people, humble, caring, that sort of thing.

Hey All,

I have been trying to post responses to Jake Tapper at the link below.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/07/did-obama-accus.html?cid=124701554#comment-124701554

They are being deleted very promptly.

Anyone else experiencing this kinda stuff on MSM blog sites?

Here is an example of what I tried to post:

Is Jake Tapper accepting funds from the McCain campaign?

When you pose it as a question it makes it almost true!

Shouldn't you be reporting on what he actually said and not passing on McCain camp talking points?

Anybody who spends more than an hour reading the various pro-Obama posts here and at other blogs knows the truth: If Obama doesn't openly play the race card, his fan club and surrogates most certainly do.

And of course, when called on it they're full of synthetic outrage:

Us? Play the race card? I'm shock, just shocked! You're only saying that because Obama's black!

Oh, and PS - Any time they don't like what they've read, one of their favorite tactics is to say what they've just read is "code". It's a secret code, with ever-changing rules designed to cast as racist anybody who disagrees with them no matter what was actually said.

I'm with you on this one. McCain has nothing to run on so he's trying to distract us with a shiny object. Britney is shiny. Race is shiny. etc. etc.

McCain accuses Obama of being an elitist when McCain wears $520.00 loafers to a golf outing, owns 8 or 9 homes and got into Annapolis because he was an Admiral's brat. Then McCain accuses Obama of being a celebrity because he attracted 200,000 Germans to hear him speak when on the same day McCain attracted 100 Ohio small businessmen to hear him speak at a German restaurant. And now McCain accuses Obama of being a racist when McCain is on record as saying of numerous occasions that he "hates gooks". How many Vietnamese-American citizens are there in America today? Do WWII veterans still say they "hate the krauts" or "hate the japs" or "hate the wops"? Would it be appropriate for a white presidential candidate to say that he/she "hates the blacks" because he/she was mugged and beaten by a gang of black people thirty years ago? Would it be appropriate for a black presidential candidate to say that he/she "hates the whites" because he/she was mugged and beaten by a gang of white people thirty years ago? America is a land of ethnicity. Only American Indians can trace the first person on their family tree to American soil. A president needs to understand that “hating” any ethnicity for any reason, let alone giving voice to that hatred, is a disrespectful and unforgivable insult to all Americans, because all Americans were once called krauts, micks, harps, wops, dagos, spics, wetbacks, niggers, coons, gooks, chinks, kikes, limeys, frogs, canucks, ragheads………………

I've posted at Tapper's site on this topic and my first 3 were deleted shortly after posting and on the 4th try, I got a spam message about having my comments approved before posting.

I noticed many other comments calling Tapper out were disappeared, too. At last look, there were a ton of pro Tapper-McCain, anti-Obama comments posted.

Besides being in the bag for McCain, the guy must have a thin skin.

Everybody on this site and those watching the MSM need to stop confusing what an article says about one candidate and what a candidate said about another candidate.

If Obama says he doesn't look like the guys on the dollar bills we have in America, then obviously is he pointing out a truth he doesn't look like the guys on the bills. Neither does John McCain for that matter either, with the exception of the fact that he over 50 and Anglo. Barack Obama is younger than 50 and African-American. These are facts. If any of us believe that America does not have people that have a problem with people that are different than themselves, then franly I am surprised. I have a grandfather who was and continues to be a racist at times. I have another grandfather and an uncle who are sexist, as well as a few co-workers of mine. Of course i am not perfect either, I complain about people showing little tolerance for those that are different in appearence than themselves (whether its about looks, race, height, age, sex etc) but by complaing I am being somewhat intolerant, it is a catch 22. Whatever the case there are many people in America who have a problem with leaders who are younger than them, many people in America have a problem with those that don't share their religion, many people have a problem with those that are not in the same class as them and many people in America have a rpoblem with those that are different than them. But on the same note many American's don't have such a problem with these sorts of things and also whether they do or they don't really is not that surprising. Really there is an amazing amount of literature about this type of subject matter and their educated folks who study this stuff. Ultimately what is sad is that those that are hoping to lead us would be interested in these types of conversations. I have always thought that our leaders are symbol of the best of the American public, so when I hear or see a possible leader put an ad out that disparages someone for being an inspiring and popular figure, it makes me feel a little sad for John McCain. Is it really so bad to be a celebrity? And if the implication is that he is nothing but show, I am sure that we can find numerous statements by both candidates to comapre and contrast the writing and speaking abilities of both candidates. Barack Obama finished towards the top of his class, John McCain finished at the bottom of his. And apparently much of the rest fo the world really likes the way Obama speaks, while John McCain can do nothing but hold private meetings, small private fundraisers, and town hall meetings with small crowds. Some of those people have not been allowed in to see the Senator from Arizona because they held a sign that said that McCain in Bush are the same. Why would McCain say that he is Bush's biggest critic, when he has supported almost all of the legislation that president Bush proposed or initiated. He backs Bush's tax cuts, when he said he was againts them, he was against the conservative immigration bill which he sponsored until his party said they would not back him. ONe might call this expediancy but clearly he was not leading the charge on any of these issues. He is not a leader he is a provacature!

TPM, you're talking past each other. Yesterday you ran Josh M's great post nailing the Britney-Paris/vapid celebrity ad
as racist dog-whistling--both suggesting that Obama was worthy of resentment and contempt as an uppity Black man operating above his station, AND associating him with loose, trashy White girls. I think that's exactly right.

But today you're playing McCain's game, credulously taking up and weighing their "Obama's played the race card" nonsense--which is very obviously an example of that old Rovian trick, "We do it, and then when they respond, we accuse them of doing what we just did."

You can't get into a reasoning game with unprincipled hacks who just want to bloody up the waters. Just call them out as hacks who are full of s**t.

(By the way: Of course Obama is talking about it's-usually-called-race with his dollar bill riff. As well he ought.)

Could I get a ruling from the judges? You write:

It's possible, perhaps even likely, that Obama's reference to not looking like other presidents on dollar bills was a reference to race. But he's said similar stuff before, and this just isn't quite conclusive enough to support the charge.

If he was referring to race, does that constitute playing the race card? What does the fact that he has said it before have to do with it?

Only American Indians can trace the first person on their family tree to American soil.

Actually, not really. They're immigrants, too, from Asia; it's just that it was an immigration (or rather, a series of them) made a very, very, long time ago.

A Republican presidential TV attack is like damp moonlight. You only time you need it is when nothing else works.
And look how McCain has Obama on the run. Just today on MSNBC---the cable with its news editors forever out to lunch---the Hilton-Spears ad has been on a hundred times if it's been on once. And the Obama corner's fearful retort, when occasionally summoned, has been 'This is making McCain look bad.'
Take that, Commander Rove, and don't stop laughing until mid-November.
And now, that recurring Democratic loser, Robert Shrum, who's never been in a campaign that he didn't talk to death before losing, just said on one of the unavoidable political talk shows that this Republican display of bad manners will hurt McCain just awful and might even cost him the election.
The campaign looks one-sided but its ugly configurations are not unprecedented. Who can forget those non-combative losses in 2000 and 2004 at the hands of a draft-evading Texas hick who has fearlessly told congress to go to hell and who, with Republican presidential determination on the line, has been resurrected and is now composing thoughtful vulgarities and racial jokes in McCain's bathroom.
And---
No, that's enough.
Obama's now talking on the cable and saying that McCain's not playing fair.
That will send shivers down Rove's yellow spine.

I am just waiting for the 'macaca' moment of this election year, because it will happen sooner or later.

I think Obama was talking about the fact that his ears are bigger and his hair is shorter than George Washington.

So this is where Rick "Bush 2004" Davis is taking the McCain campaign? And campaign manager Steve "Bull" Schmidt is letting him get away with this? Why doesn't campaign spokesman Tucker "Way Outta" Bounds say something?

OMG. I just noticed something. McCain is WHITE!