Obama and race baiting.

You really have to live in a big city for a few years to really make the word ’provincial’ sound like a put down. To make it sound really derogatory you have to be a leftie. While some inhabitants of large centers of population have little in common with their provincial countrymen, only the left consider them to be gun hugging, bible thumping, Cletus clones.

The following was sent to me earlier today.

Senator Barack Obama's sneaky, race-baiting tactics are divisive, negative and wrong, but they are nothing new. The truth is Obama has conducted low road, slice and dice politics aimed at fueling racial tensions from day one of the presidential campaign season.

Clintons4Mccain Founder Cristi Adkins says, "Move over David Duke, there's a new racist going for the oval office. Hillary supporters have seen Obama unfairly play the race card time and time again. In fact, Obama's crypto-ethnic, inflammatory remarks have become the senator's number one method of distracting voters from his lack of qualifications, numerous flip-flops and dangerous associations."

A full-scale flare-up between Senator John McCain and Obama erupted last week when the Democratic presidential candidate, campaigning in Missouri, erroneously charged Republicans and McCain with trying to scare voters about his appearance by suggesting that Obama "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

Obama's camp initially denied the remark referred to the senator's race. However, just one day later Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, admitted on "Good Morning America" that the candidate was in fact referring to his ethnic background.

The race card is no surprise for Clinton supporters. It actually started long before attention was drawn to it. An example was when comments from Michelle Obama like, "Black America will wake up" suggests 'black Americans' should wake up and vote for Obama simply because he is known as a 'black candidate.'

Dr. and Rev. James David Manning, an African American pastor from Harlem who supports Hillary Clinton or John McCain for President, says "Obama's race-baiting tactics are nothing new. He unfairly charged both President Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro of racism during the primary and then worked to spin the story to make himself the victim."

Manning continued, "Obama's statements about race include a subliminal threat branding all white people who oppose him as racists, while at the same time appealing to African Americans' empathy as a victim of racism. These tactics are underhanded and I applaud McCain for exposing the Senator's hypocrisy."

Politico is reporting attempts by liberals to present arguments that the latest McCain ads are some sort of cryptographic racism.

To most, the message was clear, if a little ham-handed: Like Hilton and Spears, Obama is famous for being famous; he's more flash than substance. 

But was there a deeper message? In the past week and a half, the liberal blogosphere has become a virtual Bletchley Park of racial cryptographers teasing out the sinister motives and subtexts of McCain’s campaign advertising. ….

The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein huffed that the McCain campaign is “running crypto-racist ads.” Bill Press, former co-host of CNN's Crossfire, proclaimed that the “Celeb” spot was "deliberately and deceptively racist." Polk Award-winning blogger Josh Marshall wrote that “the McCain campaign is now pushing the caricature of Obama as a uppity young black man whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women." 



The online hyperventilation quickly passed through to the Sunday chat show circuit. If this wasn’t dog-whistle politics, said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," then “why not use Denzel Washington or Bono?” (Brazile is a frequent decoder of subterranean racism, having previously accused former President Bill Clinton of being racially insensitive for calling Obama’s view of the Iraq war a "fairy tale.") MSNBC’s perpetually outraged host Keith Olbermann inveighed against the “almost subliminal racism, a black man with two women.” When the video briefly flashed Berlin’s Victory Column on the screen — where Obama addressed 200,000 adoring fans — New York Times columnist Bob Herbert saw a “phallic symbol.”

What is happening here is that Obama has been trying to harness ‘white guilt,’ after all he really have much going for him other than that. His surrogates have been expecting McCain to come out with at least some derogatory racial epithets, and are now getting impatient to the point of calling everything racist.

Keith Olbermann tends to be a bit like an eternal gutsache, but even he must be stretching whatever imagination he has to suggest that the ‘Celebrity’ advertisement is actually saying, “God damn it Cletus, that uppity N….. is getting ideas about our white women, get your white sheet, your cross, and a rope and meet us in Chicago. And remember this time not to light the cross till you get it out of the car.”