US election: Obama accused of playing race card as presidential campaign turns nasty.

"I'll let the American people judge" is the phrase that McCain often uses when he makes a baseless charge and wants to change the subject, leaving the original accusation hanging.

Here, he uses it again, but this time to make the astonishing charge that Barack Obama is playing the race card.

In the last few days McCain's campaign has taken such a nose dive that it's actually become disgraceful.

McCain's team blamed a speech made the previous day by Obama, in which the Democratic candidate claimed his Republican rival was trying to frighten voters by saying Obama had a strange name and did not look like other presidents.

Obama's campaign team denied it had played the race card and accused McCain's team of "gutter-style politics" over aggressive personal ads this week.

It was not clear last night whether McCain genuinely felt he had been traduced by Obama the previous day, or whether McCain's team is exploiting Obama's comments to get race up and running as an issue.

Having U-turned more than any previous presidential candidate in history in order to please his base and get his hands on the prize, it now appears as if McCain will literally say or do anything in an attempt to become president.

This is staged outrage by McCain as witnessed in this video. He can't even bring himself to justify the charge that his camp is making.

McCain's team pounced on Obama over a speech in Springfield, Missouri, in which he said: "So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. 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 those dollar bills, you know. He's risky. That's essentially the argument they're making."

For anyone to attempt to pretend that Obama is saying anything in that speech that he hasn't said many times before is simply ludicrous.

But this is where the McCain camp are heading.

I have been careful never to accuse anyone of racism during this campaign, I think it's simply too cheap a charge to make, but I can't deny that I'm beginning to see traces of something that looks awful like it. Dana Milbank in The Washington Post said:

Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee.

Presumptuous? That's getting awful near to uppity for my liking, especially as Obama is not doing anything that his Republican rival isn't already doing, Obama simply does it better and more effectively. So why is it presumptuous for Obama to act as if he is going to become president but perfectly acceptable for John McCain? McCain has even launched ad's calling himself, "The American President Americans Have Been Waiting For". Why was that not deemed presumptuous? Why is such a charge only reserved for Obama?

But for McCain to play the race card whilst accusing Obama of doing that very thing is simply a new low in this campaign. And the worst thing is that McCain is an honourable man. You can see that in the way that he can't even bring himself to seriously make the charge. He can't defend Rick Davis's comments with any passion at all, which is not to excuse him, it's simply further proof of the Faustian deal McCain is willing to make.

On the campaign trail in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, yesterday, Obama had not yet heard about the race card remark. Instead, he turned on McCain over the celebrity ad. "So far all we have heard is Paris Hilton and Britney Spears," he said. To cheers from the audience, he added: "I have to ask my opponent: 'Is that the best you can come up with?'"

Obama, who has resisted personal criticism of McCain, went on to say that such attacks would not help bring down petrol prices or address other public concerns.

The Obama campaign has remained as honourable as he promised it would be. McCain is now deep in the gutter.

By November there will be nothing left of the honourable John McCain. He will simply have ceased to exist. Rick Davis will see to that.

UPDATE:

Billmon over at Daily Kos has a different theory from mine and I fear his might be more accurate.

But McCain and his new team of Rovian handlers now realize they won't have a prayer in November unless they can motivate the conservative base and (to use Lee Atwater's charming phrase) "strip the bark" off Obama. And they have to do it NOW, so McCain can pivot back to a softer, more upbeat message in September.

So that's exactly what McCain is doing – instantly, unapologetically, without shame or embarrassment. His enormous cynicism about the political process and his contempt for the voters – not to mention his vast sense of self-entitlement - have led McCain to take exactly the same low road as the Bush family and its various henchmen (Atwater, Rove): Whatever works; whatever it takes.

And when the "Maverick" returns as "gentle John" in September, will the media forget all the shit that McCain is currently indulging in? Will they allow him to reinvent himself yet again?

Their previous track record suggests that they will do just that.

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Tags: Barack Obama, John McCain, Democrats, Republicans, US election 2008, race card, racism, Rick Davis