When it comes to presidential politics, 2008 is a year of firsts. The first black nominee. The first serious woman contender. The first Latino candidate, the first Mormon candidate and the first time anyone's ever paid attention to Ron Paul. In that pioneering spirit--and in the spirit of postmodernism--let me hereby identify a meta-riffic new campaign tactic that arose in response to Barack Obama's candidacy, that flourished in the hands of Bill Clinton during the Democratic primary and that has now found a home in John McCain's Crystal City headquarters.

I'm referring, of course, to playing the "playing the race card" card.  

At 12:00 p.m., McCain campaign manager Rick Davis sent a terse, two-sentence statement to reporters. "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck," it read. "It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong." Soon, Davis was claiming on MSNBC that Team Obama "has been feeding to journalists, all night last night and all day today, the notion that somehow something that we have done in our campaign... had racial overtones," while McCain himself  was characterizing the "race card" accusation as "legitimate" and confessing that he's "disappointed that Senator Obama would say the things he’s saying.”

My initial reaction was confusion. What did Obama say? I asked myself. Did he call McCain "Whitey McWhiteguy"? Did he deliver a Black Power salute from an Olympic podium? Did he accuse his rival of race-baiting, or bigotry, or not having any black friends? These options seemed unlikely. For one thing, Obama is not a masochistic madman bent on his own political destruction. For another, Obama has been very careful--with the partial exception of South Carolina--to never overtly encourage the accusations of racism, lest they undermine his appeal to the country's white majority as an African-American candidate who, unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, isn't also seen as the "bearer of racial grievance." So I couldn't imagine he'd start now. It certainly wouldn't help him politically. But then I remembered: one doesn't actually have to play the "race card" to end up on the receiving end of the "playing the race card" card. In fact, that's sort of the point.

Apparently, the McCain campaign was reacting--some would say overreacting--to a series of statements Obama made yesterday in Missouri. "Since they don’t have any new ideas, the only strategy they’ve got in this election is to try to scare you about me," he told supporters in Union. "They’re going to try to say that I’m a risky guy. They’re going to try to say, 'Well, you know, he’s got a funny name and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills." Some observers, like Jake Tapper of ABC News, interpreted this as Obama "accus[ing] McCain of running a racist, xenophobic campaign." On the surface, I can see why this makes sense. After all, Washington and Lincoln look pretty white on those greenbacks.

But there are two pretty compelling reasons why this doesn't wash. First, Obama didn't say that anyone is misbehaving now. He said they're "going to" misbehave in some amorphous future. Some have argued that this is a mere semantic difference--in effect, "a pretty clear effort at having it both ways." But that's not how it strikes me. To me, Obama's point seems neither accusatory nor, truth be told, predictive. It seems strategic. What he's doing is acknowledging all the subterranean doubts and suspicions that threaten his bid--his race, his name, his otherness--and saying, preemptively, that to succumb to them would be to fall prey to "politics as usual." He's neutralizing the insinuations that voters are bound to hear (from friends, neighbors, radio hosts, whomever). But he's not saying that substantive disagreements--on the issues, on his record--are somehow race-related. And he's certainly not calling McCain a racist.

To see why I don't think Obama "played the race card"--and why I don't quite buy the McCain camp's defense, which is that Obama is using race to "delegitimize any line of attack against him"--try removing race from the equation and imagining the Republican nominee delivering a similar soliloquy: "They're going to try to say I'm confused. They're going to try to say that I'm too angry. They're going to try to say, 'Well, you know, he's a North Vietnamese collaborator with PTSD and he's older than all the presidents on the dollar bills. But that's just because they don't want to debate me on the issues." Would this be "playing the age card"? Or would it be a legitimate (if preemptive) defensive maneuver against illegitimate insinuations--a maneuver, in other words, designed to focus the electorate on the stuff that McCain wants them to focus on?

There are ways, of course, that Obama could have played the race card. If he had accused McCain, for example, of implying that he has "a taste for young white women" by featuring his face alongside Britney Spears' and Paris Hilton's in yesterday's "Celeb" ad--as liberal blogger Josh Marshall has done--the charge might have merit. But Obama rightly recognized that while the spot may have been a lot of things--an insinuation about his foreignness; a potential homage to Leni Riefenstahl; a bald-faced bid (look! starlets!) for free media attention--it wasn't a subliminal message about miscegenation. Fortunately, every sentient life form knows who Hilton and Spears are, making it impossible to imagine them--unlike the anonymous blond bimbo saying "Call me" in 2006's infamous Harold Ford, Jr. commercial--as Obama's paramours. So the Democrat simply dismissed it. And despite Davis' insinuation on MSNBC that Marshall's item and others like it "did not come out of the blue," there's no evidence, or reason to suspect, that Team Obama was whispering in anyone's ear.

The second counterargument is that if McCain actually believed that Obama's Missouri remarks were "divisive, negative, shameful and wrong," he probably would've mentioned it back in June--when Obama said the same thing at a Florida fundraising event. "They’re going to try to make you afraid of me," Obama told donors. "‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’" The Florida remarks, in fact, were more explicitly "racial" than anything Obama said yesterday in Missouri. But McCain didn't complain. Nor did he complain any of the dozens of other times Obama expressed similar sentiments.

McCain's previous silence proves that when playing the "playing the race card" card, the impression you create--an impression of your rival saying something racially outrageous that benefits you politically--is far more important than whether or not you actually think he said something racially outrageous. In this case, I don't believe that's what Obama did--and judging by June 21, neither does McCain. But unlike whoever was running the show back then, new head honcho Steve Schmidt--a pugilistic Karl Rove protégé--seems to have decided that it benefits his boss to give voters the impression that Obama is the type of person who "plays the race card" (even though Obama strenuously, and necessarily, avoids doing so). And that's what's unsettling about this incident. If Schmidt and Co. were worried, as they say, that Obama was trying frame any "conventional campaign attacks as race-based" and were merely seeking to pre-empt his efforts, they could've simply said "we've never played the race card and we never will." But instead they lashed out. In playing offense instead of defense, Team McCain is actively characterizing Obama as another Al Sharpton--a "divisive, negative" Black Politician with vocal grievances who uses race as both shield and sword. This strikes me as too convenient to dismiss as a coincidence.

It's too bad. Until now, McCain has honorably avoided the tricky pitfalls of race. Back in February, he apologized for a local shock jock's questionable comments, and in April, he condemned an ad by the North Carolina Republican Party featuring images of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He knows firsthand what playing the race card actually looks like, having watched during the 2000 South Carolina primary as the delightful allies of opponent George W. Bush falsely alleged that his adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was his lovechild with a black woman. But thanks to his new coaches, McCain is no longer batting 1.000.

I guess there's a first time for everything.

UPDATE, 7:58 p.m.: A smart, and important, point from reader CalexanderJ:

I'll cut McCain a little bit of slack. Obama by using the amorphous "they" is on some level suggesting that the McCain campaign would resort to race based attacks. So far the official campaign has been good at avoided that... So on some level they have a right to be upset at the suggestion that they would bring up race when so far they had not. Of course their Race Card response seems to vindicate Obama's suggestion that racial attacks would be forthcoming, so the McCain campaign effectively ceded the high ground.

I agree.