As polls tighten, Obama plays race card
“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face,” Barack Obama said yesterday. “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 the dollar bills.”
After the McCain camp harshly criticized Obama’s statements as “shameful,” Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the Obama campaign does not think McCain is playing the race card and that Obama’s statements weren’t about race.
“There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene,” Gibbs said. “It’s not about race.”
Really? “He doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills”? What, then, if not race?
This is not the first time that Obama has stated that McCain will try to use his race and name against him. But McCain has yet to draw any inference to Obama’s race or his name. As Race 4 2008’s Alex Knepper says about Obama: “rly wants to be attacked for his race, and he’s sick of waiting for it to happen, dammit.”
What we may see happening is a hint of desperation from the Obama camp, as polls still don’t show what Democratic pundits have predicted and prematurely named a “McCrumble.” That is to say, that Obama will soon begin to leave McCain behind in the dust. The hyped world tour last week netted Obama only the slightest of bounces in the polls, and that bounce appears to have ended less than a week later. After the Gallup daily tracking poll pushed the lead to 9 points for Obama by Sunday, it has already narrowed the gap to 1 point again. And national poll averages have McCain polling over 44% for the first time since the first week of June. Obama, on the other hand, hasn’t polled over 47% the last 2 weeks.
If there’s anything we can gather from the poll data, it is that this race is increasingly looking like a battle to the wire. Obama was not able to soar away from McCain on the heels of his primary momentum, and he was not able to do it with his trip abroad. He’ll have just one more substantial opportunity to do so, at the Democratic convention in Denver next month.