Bam! Right on cue! To follow-up on my last post, John McCain went ahead and accused Obama of playing the race card. An accusation like this is the granddaddy of resentment stoking, and honestly, it seems like it almost came a little early.

The line in question? Obama in Missouri:

“what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.”

Not to get all stuff white people like on you here, but this is the thing- calling a white person a honky or a cracker or even whitey doesn’t have much impact, doesn’t leave a guy feeling like his identity’s been stripped and he’s not being seen as a complex human being- that’s what words like nigger and spic and gook do. The only thing you can call a white person that makes him feel the way a person of color feels when someone hurls one of those power words their direction is racist. That’s when white people flip the fuck out, because it means we’re not being given a chance to explain ourselves, we’re being pre-emptively branded as bad.

So when McCain complains that Obama’s playing the race card, what he’s doing is complaining that Obama called him racist. Now, A-1, he didn’t do that, and B-2, McCain’s new attacks are racist, so what’s the point of the complaint? The point is that every half-bright dickhead in Dogshit, Indiana who hears this thinks back to times when he’s been called a racist for just tellin’ it like it is, or being scared of the black kids he saw at the mall last week, and how angry that made him. Or maybe he thinks about OJ Simpson and Johnny Cochrane and the way they played the race card to get a murderer off, and the injustice of it all… And now here’s this Obama guy, doing the same thing…

And that’s how the politics of resentment work. You don’t have to make a point. You just have to make people who already have some resentment bubbling away feel like your opponent represents all of the things you find so loathsome. And then you paint yourself as the guy who’s just like them, just a simple, hardworking fella out to do his best in this world, without presumptuous minorities acting like victims all the time, but getting called these awful things just for saying what everybody knows is true… Keep at it, make that association stick, and then you’re onto it. Suddenly it’s not McCain against Obama, it’s Regular Folks against The Race Card, or The PC Police, or The Goddamn Hippies, and you didn’t have to do a thing to make the case for yourself to suddenly end up the de facto symbol for a vision of a certain kind of America, running against the things everyone decent can agree are ruining this once-great land of ours.

So where do you go from here? Well, that’s the trick. Because this is a grease fire, y’all- you can’t put it out with water. You can’t offer a cogent, rational outline for why what your opponent said is untrue, because they’re not engaging people on a rational level, they’re hitting them viscerally. You either hit back with the same sort of dirty shit, or you hold out hope that there aren’t enough mean-spirited jerks running around America to get this to pay off. But nobody ever lost a bet by underestimating the American public’s taste for slime.