Politics: Playing the Race Card

Quick notes on politics and the playing of the "race card."

• Maybe I'm not recalling things correctly, but I think I remember Condi Rice previously saying that she was a friend of one of the girls who died in the Birmingham bombing years ago but that she didn't remember much about it. Yet, on 60 Minutes, she gave, what appeared to me, to be a different story. I never heard her mention feeling the ground shake or anything else before. And, frankly, linking it to TWOT as she did smelled of rank political opportunism.
• When George Allen was running for governor of Virginia, he was proud of the confederate flag that he kept behind his desk. He was proud of the rebel flag on his car in either high school or college. He was proud of the noose he kept in his office. Now, he seems to be singing a different tune. However, this one will hurt him more:

Larry J. Sabato, one of Virginia's most-quoted political science professors and a classmate of Allen's in the early 1970s, said in a televised interview Monday that Allen used the epithet.

"I'm simply going to stay with what I know is the case and the fact is he did use the n-word, whether he's denying it or not," Sabato, now director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Chris Matthews on MSNBC. Sabato would not say whether he had heard Allen say the word, and did not know whether it was true that Allen used the word frequently in college.

Larry Sabato has appeared on the national news and is well respected in the D.C. area for his political analysis. I don't think that can be blown off like the following can be blown off:

Shelton, a Hendersonville, N.C., radiologist who was a tight end and wide receiver for the university in the early 1970s, said Allen used the n-word only around white teammates.

Shelton said the incident with the deer head occurred during their college days when he, Allen and another teammate who has since died were hunting on a farm the third man's family owned near Bumpass, Va., 40 miles east of the university.

Shelton said Allen asked the other teammate where black families lived in the area, then stuffed a deer's head into the mailbox of one of the homes.

• Michael Steele is using the race card in a "reverse" way from what I can tell. In interviews, before he said he was running for congress, Steele would say that Blacks have to concentrate on the issues and then vote on the issues and how they line up with their world-view. Now, he seems to be saying to Blacks, "The Dems have let you down by not giving the nod to Mfume, so vote for me to show Dems they can't take the Black vote for granted."

So be it. But, I think the following is an example of him going overboard when he, Steele, has said something similar about Bush and the administration's slow response to Katrina:

Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele is criticizing his Democratic opponent in Maryland's Senate race, Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, for repeatedly invoking Hurricane Katrina to stir anti-Republican sentiment among blacks.

This is boring.