Playing With a Full Deck of Race Cards

I am no fan of Barack Obama.

I am, however, interested in the racial dimension of this presidential race and its ramifications for our nation. I don’t want to sound like a “Johnny One-Note,” but it is precisely because far too many of my fellow Americans, particularly white Americans, have avoided like the plague the genuinely honest discussion of race that Obama implores us to have that I return once again to this topic.

On at least two occasions now, Obama has cautioned voters against falling for his opponents’ strategy of racial fear-mongering. In other words, he has told audiences that it will just be a matter of time before the Republicans exploit his race for their own political gain.

Yet the Republicans have referenced Obama’s race only in order to celebrate his “historic” candidacy. George Will and Bill Bennett are among those on “the Right” who have had rapturous eruptions over the fact that Obama’s candidacy proves America has largely moved beyond its “racist” past, and John McCain at an NAACP event all but endorsed his Democratic opponent.

The McCain campaign, to its credit, did not go on the defensive when Obama launched his most recent preemptive attack. It rightly accused him of “playing the race card,” and “from the bottom of the deck.” Republicans and other whites who are growing increasingly disgusted with having been subjected for decades to unjust charges, whether implied or expressed, of “racism,” ought to learn a thing or two from McCain’s response to Obama’s sleazy tactics.

But I suggest we go further.

It was Obama himself, not Republicans, who exploited Obama’s race for political advancement. We need to remind the American public at every turn that the self-proclaimed “Trans-Racial” candidate, “The Great Unifier,” is determined to accentuate his melanin, even if subtly, to achieve victory over his competitors. Worst, he is ready to use his race in the most devious of ways.

When Obama tells audiences that his opponents are going to attempt to scare them from voting for him by focusing on his physical dissimilarities from past presidents, he is really putting them on notice that if they vote against him, it will be because this tactic has succeeded. That is, Obama is telling his white audiences that if they do not support him, it is because they are really “racist.”

It is of this that Republicans and other “anti-Obamians” have to constantly remind the white electorate. They must impress indelibly upon the minds of the majority of the people who Obama aspires to govern that in making remarks of the kind under discussion, in entertaining suspicions that they may really be “closet racists,” he reveals that he has neither knowledge of nor high regard for them. They should also repeatedly mention that if Obama doesn’t sincerely believe this, then it is he who is trying to racially intimidate voters into supporting him.

Just as Obama had given a speech in which he bluntly stated that he would neither suffer attacks against his “patriotism” nor impugn the “patriotism” of anyone else, so McCain ought to give a speech making a similar point with respect to racial equality. McCain ought to say, in response to Obama’s race-baiting tactics, that he will neither tolerate assaults against his commitment to racial equality nor launch them against his opponent … or something along those lines.

Just the following considerations alone suffice to prove that, like it or not, and as much as the Republicans may wish it isn’t so, race is an issue in this campaign season: 94 percent of all black Americans support Obama; the record of Obama and his wife that the establishment press has labored indefatigably to obscure decisively demonstrates their ideological affinity with the black nationalism of James Cone, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan; the “mainstream” media continues to herald Obama’s candidacy as “historic,” the implication being that unless you support it, you will impede “history in the making”; and, of course, Obama spares no occasion to appropriate his race when he believes it is to his advantage to do so.

It is high time for everyone who is more interested in truth and the welfare of their nation than political correctness to dare to recognize Obama for who he really is.