If Republicans Won’t Be Racist Toward Obama He’ll Just Have To Do It Himself

Mark Jaquith sums up Obama’s playing of the race card nicely:

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.

That’s the problem with most liberals, it seems. In order for them to get elected and gain power they must first convince the public that there’s some great problem that only they can fix. They tell the farmers that they can’t grow crops profits without subsidies, and they they promise to deliver those subsidies. They tell young black students that they can’t go to college without race-based enrollment preferences, and they promise to deliver that so-called “affirmative action.” They tell home owners that their delinquent mortgages aren’t there fault, and then promise to deliver massive amounts of other people’s money to bail them out.
In Obama’s situation, he wants to claim the mantle of victim. He’s just a black man trying to make his way in racist America. The problem is that America, or more specifically his political opponents, aren’t obliging him by actually being racist. So in order to keep his campaign message alive he’s got to invent the racism in question.