McCain, Race, and The Dollar

This article and video were linked to by Sullivan. It's interesting and insightful stuff and answers the "Who's on First" question about the race card. But I believe to make his point he may parse YouTube's policies as well as McCain's Adman's abilities a bit too much. BUT that being said it still doesn't take away from the argument about who played what card first.

McCain Mocked Idea of Obama on U.S. Currency...in JUNE

Andrew Sullivan, Chris Bodenner, and Eli Sanders all note that the McCain campaign's strategy on race is to (a) play the race card and then (b) accuse Obama of having played the race card.

The issue here, of course, is that John McCain claimed great umbrage at Barack Obama's lighthearted comment that Bush and McCain would emphasize that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

But if John McCain thinks that comment was playing the race card, then why did he play it first? One month ago -- in late June -- a McCain ad superimposed Obama's visage on a one hundred dollar bill as part of an effort to mock his supposed 'presumptuousness.'

McCain attack ad, released June 27, 2008:

(Side note: As you can see, the video's still image is of Obama on currency. Note that the image doesn't occur until about three-quarters of the way through the video. The way YouTube works, the default image occurs at the midpoint. In other words, McCain's campaign affirmatively choose this image.)

So let's just be clear: John McCain is injecting race into this the campaign, and he's doing so to serve his own political ambitions. As Chuck Todd says: "Anytime race is THE topic du jour in the campaign, it's a bad day for Obama. Period." And Josh Marshall adds, it's McCain's "only chance."

John McCain understands this is the only way he can win, and that's why he's playing this card, from allegations of reverse racism to transparent attempts to make Barack Obama seem "foreign."

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