McCain's team have played the race card from day one.

Bob Herbert of The New York Times really has nailed the myth that Obama "played the race card" and has, instead, pointed out the numerous ways in which the McCain camp has been playing the race card from the very beginning of this campaign.

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.

I had forgotten all about that initial ad which suggested that Obama was not quite as American as McCain, although we were never actually told what made McCain so especially American and what quality Obama lacked, we were left to fill in those blanks for ourselves.

And, as Herbert points out, McCain's tactics have only worsened since then and are actually repeating an old Republican theme:

Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.

The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, “Harold, call me.”

Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.

Of course, McCain claims that the message they were sending was that Obama was simply a vacuous celebrity, but it is interesting that they chose the two white female celebrities that they did. Are there no vacuous male celebrities they could have chosen? No vacuous black celebrities of either gender?

And, of course, race lies behind that other notion; that Obama somehow is "presumptuous":

The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place.

Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this — the sole reason — is that he is black.

I had noticed each of these events individually, but Herbert does a wonderful job of stringing them all together and showing that they are actually part of a pattern that has been just under the surface of McCain's campaign from day one.

That's what makes his charge that Barack Obama had "played the race card" into such an obscenity. Coming from a man who voted to rescind Martin Luther King Day, that really is an insult too far.

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Tags: McCain, Obama, race card, US election 2008