Democrat Barack Obama, the first black candidate with a shot at winning the White House, says John McCain and his Republican allies will try to scare them by saying Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
Er, all those other presidents? Isn’t there just one President on the dollar bill?
And have you noticed that it’s always Obama who’s actually injecting race into the campaign, under the guise of warning about what those Evil Republicans will do? And is it really likely that John McCain would be out there saying “don’t vote for Obama, he’s black?”
I anticipate a lot of Photoshop fun with this quote, though.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
Not only is there only 1 president on the $1.00 bill, but assuming he meant currency in general, he might want to look at the $10 and $100 which do not feature any U.S. President. Perhaps he spoke…”inartfully” again.
That keeps happening. And another reader emails: “Isn’t the gaffe ‘*other* presidents’; again he thinks he’s already president.” Heh. I’d missed that.
On the other hand, reader David Sette emails: “From the quote I read, it is clear he’s talking about bills, plural. As is the 1, 5, 20, 50 etc. Hardly a gaffe.” I don’t know, it seems quite comparable to the “Bushisms” that people have been pointing out for years as evidence that our current President isn’t very bright. Yes, those features are kind of lame, but sauce for the goose, etc. . . .
MORE: Okay, what’s really weird is that Obama just said the same thing about himself, in Berlin:
I know that I don’t look like the other Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.
So who’s the one raising these racial issues, again?
STILL MORE: Dave Price:
“My opponents are racists!†Ugh, that didn’t take long. Explain to me again how this guy is different than Jesse Jackson? What happened to being “the postracial candidate?â€
I imagine that we’ll see a lot of this kind of thing if Obama is elected President. And perhaps the best reason to vote against Obama is to spare the country an administration that reflexively characterizes any criticism as racist.
MORE STILL: The gift that keeps giving. Reader Jack Moody writes:
“I know that I don’t look like the other Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”
There’s another gaffe in that statement too.
Broadly, racially, speaking I would think the current and previous Sec State would count. Or is Obama limiting himself to just *other* presidents again?
When the press is in the tank for you, you get sloppy.
AND MORE: Jake Tapper has a different version of the quote that eliminates the dollar-bill gaffe. But Tapper also notes that the Obama campaign is consistently making bogus charges of racism and xenophobia:
There’s a lot of racist xenophobic crap out there. But not only has McCain not peddled any of it, he’s condemned it. . . . I’ve seen racism in campaigns before — I’ve seen it against Obama in this campaign (more from Democrats than Republicans, at this point, I might add) and I’ve seen it against McCain in South Carolina in 2000 . . . What I have not seen is it come from McCain or his campaign in such a way to merit the language Obama used today. Pretty inflammatory.
Just wait. It’ll get worse between now and November.