Obama Treads Lightly on Issue of Race

Race has once again crept into the presidential race this week, and Barack Obama did his best to ignore it, the New York Times reports. John McCain’s campaign accused Obama of “playing the race card…from the bottom of the deck” when the Dem said McCain might attack him because he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” But Obama resisted retaliating, trying to prevent a racial firefight.

“Ideally, you want to punch back right to the solar plexus,” said one Democratic strategist. “But when race gets injected…it is really fraught with peril.” But race is sure to follow Obama. Yesterday, self-styled black revolutionaries protested at a rally, accusing Obama of neglecting the black community. “I may not have spoken out the way you want me to,” Obama responded, but “I have spoken out…and spoken out forcefully.” (More Obama 2008 stories.)