WaPo writer, Peter Beinart:

“Race will be central to this campaign because McCain needs it to be.”

McCain will play the race card simply because he doesn’t have many other cards to play.

Think about it this way: Many of the voters who right now won’t vote for Obama because he’s black would probably vote for Colin Powell even though he’s black. That’s because they don’t see Powell as a racial redistributionist, a guy who would favor his community at their expense. There’s no rational reason to believe Obama would, either. But because, unlike Powell, Obama is a liberal Democrat who enjoys overwhelming black support, that’s what many racially hostile white voters assume.

For these voters, Obama can’t make race go away by ignoring it, especially because the GOP and the media won’t. He needs to acknowledge their fears and do something dramatic to assuage them. Paradoxically, his best shot at deracializing the campaign is to explicitly make race an issue.

He can do that with a high-profile speech — and maybe a TV ad — calling for the replacement of race-based preferences with class-based ones.

..the point that Obama has made ever since he took the national stage (but which some whites still refuse to believe): that he represents not racial division but national unity.

On the merits, there’s a lot to say for class-based affirmative action. Over the decades, racial preferences have played a vital role in creating a black middle class, but that middle class is now large and self-perpetuating. It is the multi-generational poor — whether urban and black or Appalachian and white — who truly need a boost today.

The Post Article

ShareThis