Matt highlights a recent Bloggingheads between Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith discussing how the McCain campaign will relate to the inevitable smears against Barack Obama should he be the eventual nominees. All three are pretty accurate in the wager that McCain will benefit doubly from disavowing these smears, by being able to simultaneously gain the confidence of those they turn off and still gaining the votes of anyone who would believe them.
But I have to take issue with Matt's assertions that "people inclined to believe that any black guy is secretly out to get whitey are going to believe that no matter what anyone says or does and vice versa" and "it's not as if it's going to take racist comments for racists to notice that Obama's black." The thing is, the folks one has to worry about aren't the ones who would vote against Obama simply because he's black. Those probably aren't people who will be won over this election, period. The people that are a concern are those who are turned off by the image of Obama as a "militant black man." There's a sizable slice of the American populace that is okay with African Americans, as long as they don't get the impression that they're too angry or in-their-face about being black. And it's this portion of the population that might be compelled by Obama's other positions but successfully manipulated by racial smears. And that's exactly what the most recent racial flaps are attempting to do -- paint Obama as a militant by association and turn off that category of voter, which I think is a fairly substantial group.
--Kate Sheppard
