The Issue Obama Cannot Ignore

Today E.J. Dionne recounts the history of Presidential races where a candidate had to face head-on a difficult, emotionally loaded issue, e.g., John Kennedy and Catholicism. About this year's campaign, he concludes:

"The great opportunity this year for less scrupulous Republican strategists is that Obama is both black and a Columbia-Harvard-educated former professor who lived in the intellectually rarified precincts of Hyde Park in Chicago, Manhattan's Upper West Side and Cambridge, Mass. They can go after him subtly on race and overtly on elitism. They can turn the facts of Obama's life into mutually reinforcing liabilities.

Is this unfair? Yes it is. But if our nation is to cast off the shackles of race this year, Obama will have to grapple more than he'd like with the burdens that our history and the past travails of liberalism have forced him to bear."

Clearly Barack Obama has already addressed this issue head-on, beginning with his landmark speech in Philadelphia in March and again after the self-indulgent behavior of former pastor Jeremiah Wright. However, the Karl Rove trainees who now direct the McCain campaign----and their many totally unscrupulous allies lurking on the web and hiding behind the anonymous 527 organizations---will keep piling it on in the 90 days until November 4.

Realists remember every day that politics ain't pretty, and a fact-based, on-message and tough minded campaign addressing the record of both McCain and his party since 2000 are critical to the Democrats. But that is not enough. I agree with Dionne that the candidate himself must find a way to address the race issue in addressing undecided voters in this, the final stage of Obama's unlikely quest for the Presidency.