2008
The O.J. Card [Greg Pollowitz]
Via HotAir, the Editors of the New York Times are suggesting that Team McCain is tying Barack Obama to O.J. Simpson:
But Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, had a snappy answer. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” he said. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.’’
The retort was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. It puts the sin for the racial attack not on those who made it, but on the victim of the attack.
It also — and we wish this were coincidence, but we doubt it — conjurs [sic] up another loaded racial image.
The phrase dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck” entered the national lexicon during the O.J. Simpson saga. Robert Shapiro, one of Mr. Simpson’s lawyers, famously declared of himself, Johnny Cochran and the rest of the Simpson defense team, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”
It’s ugly stuff. How about we leave Britney, Paris, and O.J. out of this — and have a presidential campaign?
Honestly, did anyone remember the Shapiro quote? And if you search for the phrase, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck" on the Times's site, there is a reference to the line in Johnny Cochrans's obituary in 2005 and then there's a nine-year gap until it next appears in 1996. How can a phrase enter the national lexicon if the line is never actually used?
If anything, I thought the "bottom of the deck" referred to the Obama family revelation yesterday that he's related to Wild Bill Hickok. Of course, in a blog post on that story, Michael Powell of the NY Times mentions that Hickok ends up dead. If McCain had said it, the editors would probably have written that McCain was referring to a President Obama getting assassinated because he's black.
07/31 06:32 PM
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