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Barack Obama may be his own worst enemy when it comes to matters of racism and xenophobia. Speaking to a Springfield, MO crowd, he said:
Nobody thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they are 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 of those other presidents on the dollar bills.’
Here is a video clip of the remarks.
Neither Bush nor McCain has challenged Obama’s patriotism, called his name “funny” or brought up his appearance (read: racial makeup) as a detrimental quality. These aren’t real attacks that Obama is referencing. These are attacks that Obama is himself launching — against himself.
He’s trying to play the persecuted messiah. And if Bush and McCain won’t fit into the “white Republican” stereotype and start launching racist and xenophobic attacks of their own, then by Zeus, Obama will act it out for us, complete with a backwoods Southern drawl accent, and then claim it as fact. As is unfortunately the case with much of the civil rights movement post Dr. King, the only thing that is apparently less tolerable than racism is the conspicuous lack of it.
This is essentially a repeat of Hillary Clinton’s victim act — pretending that she was being picked on and attacked because she was a woman (and not, gasp, because she was the frontrunner).
I find it tremendously lame for Obama to stoop to inventing racial attacks. If anything, the story here is that the American public is, on the whole, indifferent about Obama’s racial makeup. He’s polling higher than his vanilla-white opponent. Even if McCain were inclined to run racially charged attack ads against Obama, he’d be stupid to do so. The backlash would be catastrophic to his campaign. Americans, on the whole, have little stomach for racism. Obama knows this, and this may be why he’s launching false accusations of racism. He knows that the “racism meter” of most Americans is more sensitive than their “bullshit meter.”
Note: before the Obamamaniacs inevitably pile on — I am not a Republican. I am not going to vote for John McCain.