Our national schizophrenia about race is about to take center stage again.  I thought it was caught perfectly during the primary in an awed AP reporter's account of an Obama rally in South Carolina...

One could guess the thoughts of the blacks and whites in that crowd: Can you believe that our state — South Carolina, first to secede and first to open fire in the Civil War — is now catapulting a black man to the front of the presidential contest in a year that bodes well for Democrats?

"Race doesn't matter," some began to chant. "Race doesn't matter!"

Obviously, race does matter, doesn't it? 

The debate on the left continues to be whether Obama, who is, after all, half-white, is black enough.  (He is almost certainly black enough for the GOP.)  The issue was brought to the fore again by a heckler at a recent Obama event who demanded to know why, in the face of "All these attacks ... being made on the African community" the candidate has "not spoken to the issues or spoken on behalf of the African community?"

(Obama assured him he had, but added: "That doesn't mean I'm always going to satisfy the way you guys want me to talk, which gives you the option of voting for someone else, which gives you the option of running for office yourself.  But the one thing that is important is that we're respectful toward each other.")

You could be forgiven for being a little confused about who's playing the race card these days. Maybe there's more than one in the deck.  I mean, is it Obama for warning that McCain is going to play it, or McCain for accusing Obama of accusing him of playing it?  Is it the casual dropping of the H-Bomb (the dreaded middle name), or Michelle Obama's calling it "the ultimate fear bomb"?  Is it Obama's self-othering, or the othering of Obama by others? 

The latest round of the Great Race Debate opened with a comment Obama made on a campaign stop in Missouri suggesting that McCain and his minions would be othering him all the way to November fourth, inspiring fear and trembling in swing voters by pointing out the obvious: that the Democrat "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." 

Well, not for long, hopefully...


And why not, I say?  We could use more color in our money, I think.  I remember how charmed I was by the old forint banknotes that were still in circulation when I first moved to Budapest.  On the old one hundred was Lajos Kossuth, the exiled revolutionary.  On the five hundred (which was worth a couple of bucks back then) was syphilitic poet Endre Ady.  Bela Bartok, the classical composer, looked out sternly from the thousand forint note.  Szechenyi, the great polymath, was on the five-thousand.  Both Kossuth and Szechenyi were important political figures, but Ady and Bartok were artists (albeit artists of the highest order). 

Nowadays, Hungarian currency is more nativist.  Szechenyi remains, but his rival Kossuth has been banished from their banknotes, along with the great poet and composer, replaced by ancient founders and folk heroes, two of whom, Rakoczi (on the new 500) and Bethlen (on the 2000), were Transylvanian princes who led separate uprisings against the Habsburgs.  An interesting combination, given that the Habsburgs and Transylvania remain potent symbols of Hungarian nationalism in the age of union.

Anyway, I like the idea of honoring great artists on currency, although it's obviously not in fashion.  One of the unforeseen benefits of a McCain presidency would be the new currency stagflation would necessitate, although we'd probably end up with Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston on the new bills.  If Obama gets in he'll be on everything, of course.  But my pick for the most currency-worthy American poet would be Whitman, hands-down.  I think Uncle Walt would look fetching on the face of a fiver, and then a depiction of his famous twenty-eight bathers on the back.

Langston Hughes would be another brilliant choice for our new banknotes.  Although there is the little matter of his communism, he embodies perfectly the diversity and complexity of the American epic.  I'd like to see Poe staring forlornly from a banknote, his raven on the reverse.  Maybe a dime with Emily Dickinson, birdlike and febrile.  Or Anne Sexton, unraveling with a bottle of pills, a martini and a fag, on a silver dollar.  Miles Davis would kick ass on a ten.  I'd love to see Duke Kahanamoku, Jackie Robinson, or Muhammad Ali on a twenty. 

I guess that's what we have postage stamps for.

But I digress.  Race is obviously a factor here.  We don't always have to view society through the lens of race, of course, but I think it's clear that Obama's "otherness" is actually one of his greatest assets.  It's what appealed to voters looking for the change he seemed to embody before they knew much more about him.  It's not surprising, or particularly out of bounds, for his opponent to try to play it as a liability. 

The fact that in this instance — when he contrasted himself to "all those other presidents on dollar bills" — Obama was speaking to a friendly audience, and chose to frame his otherness as a potential liability the opposition was prepared to exploit, rather than as an obvious asset he's fully capable of putting into play as well, shows a clear campaign strategy and a chosen narrative.  And it does seem to support the McCain camp's charges of "a very sophisticated injection of race" into the campaign by Obama & Co. 

Some would argue, along with Bob Herbert in today's Times, that Obama's been put on the defensive by McCain's "low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates." The ads are tacky, it's true, but they are in no way of the nature or magnitude of, say, the ad that tanked Harold Ford Jr.'s senate bid in 2006 (and it's not a foregone conclusion that a skanky black or Latina would not have worked in the ad — the choice of a white woman may actually have been the least incendiary in that instance). Or, even worse, and closer to home, Kerry Healey's "Deval Patrick Will Rape White Women In Parking Garages If Elected" ad. 

Overheated reaction to the Paris-Britney-Obama ad is reminiscent of Orlando Patterson's hysterical — I don't mean hysterical as in funny, either — just plain hysterical — claim that Hillary's 3 a.m. phone call ad was a mini, modern-day "Birth of a Nation."  The racist message was implicit, Patterson acknowledged, but he saw it. Well, of course he did.  Successful negative ads like these allow the projection of whatever fears the viewer harbors into them.  The flipside, as the Obama people know, is that given a similarly vague positive ad people will project whatever hopes they harbor into it.  With no proof and no effort on Obama's part, he's been hailed as the first female presidential candidate by feminists like Susan Faludi, and as a post-nuclear pacifist by James Carroll. 

If you are not inclined to view the world through the lens of race, or have the liberty not to, you would not immediately see the Paris-Britney-Obama ad as touching on fears of an international, interracial ménage à trois.  It's fairly common knowledge that the candidate himself is mixed-race.  If that's not your bag, you've likely already made up your mind about him.  Even if you were so inclined to see the world, fear isn't the first thing that comes to mind when contemplating such a scene. 

No, I'm more inclined to see the message as something in the "girly man" genre the GOP has used so successfully on the last two Democratic candidates.  Obama as the first dumb blond party girl President was the message I got.  I'm sorry, but Obama is just not a scary black man.  He's a skinny Harvard grad with a voice like the one Dave Chappelle uses for his whiteface sketches. 

The truth is, the idea that hatred and racism characterize the GOP is at least as useful to Democrats in activating their own base as hatred and racism are to the GOP in whipping up segments of theirs.  Both parties have a stake in the othering of Obama.  But there are dangers for both in doing so, too. 

I was watching a bickerfest on the topic the other day, on Crossfire, I think it was.  The Obamabot on the panel kept repeating that the opposition "can't use Obama's middle name to insinuate" anything negative about him.  Pat Buchanan, who was also a guest, kept coming back at her with "of course they can."  And he's right.  They can.  And they will.  So get used to it.  Insinuation is not a crime.  Yet.

Which is how people are going to react to ridiculous proscriptions on speech.  When some overly protective Obama supporters argue that no one is allowed to say "Barrack Hussein Obama" because it's essentially "repeating the rumor," they lose points not only with those ignorant enough to believe that his middle name proves he's a "secret Muslim" — people, in other words, who would likely not vote for him in the first place — they also lose among people sitting on the fence but smart enough to know that the so-called H-bomb is a dud. 

Liberals should know better than to play into the PC stereotypes by telling folks what they can't say.  If people want to call the candidate by his full given name, it's fair game.  Remember:

Obamoids should think of every utterance of the H-word as a teachable moment.  I mean, like it or not, Hussein's the guy's middle name.  We all know it.  And while accusations of implicit racism every time the opposition uses it may be accurate enough, they're also costly.  Liberals should demonstrate more faith in the possibility of educating swing voters about Obama's story, which his name is a part of.  By taking the bait of scorched-earth Republicans like Rush Limbaugh they play into the GOP's hands.  Any strategic gains they might garner from naming and shaming are lost by their resorting to PC methods.

It is obvious Obama does not look like other presidents on dollar bills.  It's obvious he doesn't have an Anglo-Saxon name.  Voters don't need him to remind them.  It's condescending and disingenuous — at best — to bring it up as he did.  And he deserved the smackdown.  Turnabout is fair play.  Obama should stick to viewing otherness as the asset that it is, and steer clear of playing the victim of othering by others.  You want to rev up the base by insinuating that the opposition's racist?  Whose base? is the operative question.

McCain's crew has nothing to lose, really, from throwing the kitchen sink at Obama.  Obamoids should see it for what it is, and stick to the script.  Obama himself is, thankfully, much smarter than most of his acolytes.   He let the controversy stew for a day or two, and then played it off: "In no way do I think that John McCain's campaign was being racist," Obama finally said. "I think they're cynical. And I think they want to distract people from talking about the real issues."

I think he's at least half right there.