COM 386: Race -- 'put[ting] the hay down where the goats can reach it?'

Race is one of those issues nobody likes to talk about. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has spoken on it only one, when he was called out for incindiary rhetoric by his former pastor, and Republican John McCain has refused to raise racial issues even though others in his campaign use racially and ethnically charged code words to paint Obama as out of the American mainstream. The American media, also, tend not to discuss racial issues as openly as the British papers do.

Amid signs the issue will come up in the campaign's last days, and enough lingering animosity exists to affect the outcome of the election, two publications have major stories on race today.

Politico's Mike Allen has a story on disagreement in the McCain campaign over a racial attack on Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Many, including Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, want McCain to go after the Obama-Wright connection. McCain doesn't want to go there. Says Allen, citing a camapgn official who spoke to him on background:

McCain felt it would be sensed as racially insensitive,” the official said. “But more important is that McCain thinks that the bringing of racial religious preaching in black churches into the campaign would potentially have grave consequences for civil society in the United States.”

Asked about the issue during the firestorm over it last March, McCain told Sean Hannity on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes”: “I think that when people support you, it doesn’t mean that you support everything you say. Obviously, those words and those statements are statements that none of us would associate ourselves with. And I don’t believe that Senator Obama would support any of those … I do know Senator Obama. He does not share those views.”

Another story, by Roger Simon, explores U.S. Rep. John Lewis' warning to McCain and Palin against racist rhetoric. Lewis, D-Ga, who took part in the lunch-counter sit-in in Nashville as a young person, said:

Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse,” Lewis said. “George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Ala. As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all.

And Simon, who covered Wallace in the 1970s, recalled his telling reporters, "'My strategy? ... I put down the hay where the goats can get it.' And then he laughed." Simon said Lewis was warning McCain, "Don’t go there. Don’t even think about going there. Don’t lay down the hay where the goats can get it."

Also weighing in today on racial issues was The New York Times.

Senior reporter Adam Nagourney today introduces a four-part series on race in today's Times. He says the issue is difficult, because it involves "sentiments that are whispered, internalized or masked by discussions of culture or religion." But, he adds, "the situation is confounding aides on both sides, who like everyone else are waiting to see what role race will play in the privacy of the voting booth."
In four sidebar stories, reporters found:

• Students in Cincinatti and neighboring Kentucky colleges thought race mattered, perhaps especially among black voters.
  
• White voters in the Deep South and rural Virginia had complex and troubling, but evolving attitudes toward Obama's biracial heritage.
  
• Race is not a factor in Colorado's majority-white communities in the Rocky Mountains ... perhaps because so few black people live there.
  
• Volunteers walking precincts for the Obama campaign explain how they talk about race on people's doorsteps.

Also in today's Times, a poll that specifically suggests negative campaigning is backfiring on the McCain campaign. Six in 10 voters surveyed said that Mr. McCain had spent more time attacking Mr. Obama than explaining what he would do as president; by about the same number, voters said Mr. Obama was spending more of his time explaining than attacking," the poll found.