Obama & O.J.: Race still matters...even to Democrats

(Cross posted to Daily Kos)

If you have your antennae up, sometimes you receive the weirdest signals. Do you ignore them? Or do they foreshadow something important?

Case in point:

John Edwards was in Elkader, Iowa in front of a crowd of about 100 people when he got a very strange question from an elderly gentleman in the audience.

[The] man told Edwards that “something has been sticking in my craw” and explained that “a certain fella committed two murders in California and the jury found him not guilty. And all they said was ‘It’s payback time.’

[...]

“How are you going to get that brought out in your campaign? Will the same thing happen? If he should become elected, you think Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Oprah Winfrey are going to let him forget about that and their obligation?” the man said, not identifying who he meant by “he” and “him.”

So, wait. He wants someone -- Obama and/or Edwards, anyone! -- to denounce the outcome of the O.J. trial? Or else...?

WTF?

This story surfaces on the heels of Frank Rich's earlier observation:

[R]acism is the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign [but] some readers wrote in to say that only a fool would believe that white Americans would ever elect an African-American president, no matter what polls indicate. We’ll find out soon enough. If that’s the case, Mr. Obama can’t win in Iowa, where the population is roughly 95 percent white, or in New Hampshire, which is 96 percent white.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Obama can't win in those two states; but you can believe that guys like Ed Rollins (Huckabee's new BFF) are watching very carefully to see how this plays out. Remember -- it was Rollins who bragged about paying off the black preachers in New Jersey to stay home on election day. [P.S. Christie Todd Whitman won that election.]

It should be, by now, obvious that Republicans will ultimately rely on the race card in order to rally their base in the general election. "Race excites the base." It's all about coded messages. Kill Islamofascists? A racial message. Deport illegal immigrants? Another racial message. And surely it's only a matter of time before the quadrennial theme of "law and order" makes an appearance, with Glenn Beck (CNN), Bill O'Reilly (FNC) and Pat Buchanan (MSNBC) forming a trifecta from hell on the cable news channels.

Race excites the base.

The weird thing is that this is surfacing in the context of the Edwards campaign. No, let me rephrase that: These are Democrats asking these questions, now. It really makes you realize how incredibly toxic it is when a rival campaign raises the issue of "Obama's past cocaine use."

Think about it: even after the Clinton campaign disavowed Shaheen's comments, voters were still ready to ask Edwards to reflect on the connection between Obama and O.J. ...and his answer will be, presumably, very important to them.

It's the kind of question that destroys two campaigns for the price of one. After all, what can Edwards say? Does he defend Obama? That would be, shall we say, unsatisfying to the Edwards campaign -- they need to make up ground on Obama in order to win. But if he even appears to take the bait, I don't need to tell you that it's over for Edwards. He'll come off looking like McCain laughing about "beating the bitch."

[Note: BTW, don't be surprised if McCain becomes the next "comeback kid."]

Look, I'm not suggesting that Clinton planted these questions. For one thing, she wouldn't need to -- once released, Shaheen's toxic cloud has a mind of its own. I'm simply saying that race still matters in the minds of voters -- both Republican and Democrat alike.

A few hours before he handled that O.J. question in Elkader, Edwards had a campaign event at a Manchester, Iowa steakhouse.

Rita Domeyer, a retired farm wife from Dyersville, showed up to listen to him.

“I like Obama; I read his book and I think he had quite an upbringing, and he handed it very well,” said Domeyer, as she waited for Edwards to arrive on his campaign bus. “I’m not racist and I don’t like to hear anybody say, ‘because he’s black he can’t win...’ But you hear a lot the other way; we’re pretty white around here, you know,” she said.

Yes.

Well.

What's going on here? I'm generally in agreement with the concept of Occam's razor ("All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best."). And/But I also do not believe in coincidences when it comes to political campaigns...and political campaign reporting.

So what do you think? Am I imagining things? Is this just too many reporters chasing too few stories in the waning days of a campaign? Or is it the beginning of something really ugly? Like I said, we know it's coming, despite what Obama himself might want to believe:

When Obama, in effect, launched his presidential bid in Manchester, N.H. last December he made a point of playing down the potential hazards of being a black (or mixed race) candidate in a country where four out of five voters are white.

Reflecting on the 2006 Senate election in Tennessee, Obama said, “I don’t think Harold Ford lost because of his race.”

I love Obama, abut that observation just makes me a bit uneasy -- has everyone really forgotten the jungle drums already?

Bottom line: Obama's very DNA is a living testament to the idea that the races can be reconciled, that there is hope, that we can get past this ugly part of our history and move on in an uplifting way, better for the experience. If he runs his campaign that way, he -- and we -- will be OK in the end.

But if anyone thought this was going to be easy, they better think again.