Barack Obama suggested that Republicans "are likely to make race an issue," saying conservatives would try to scare voters using Obama's race.
BACKGROUND
In June, via
ABC News, Barack Obama preemptively warned that Republicans would try to make race an issue, being Obama is the first black presidential candidate in a general election campaign for the Democrats.
In July, according to
Breitbart, Barack Obama repeated his warning and said,
"Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name, you know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."
Much buzz surrounded that "dollar bill" comment with many accusing Barack Obama of bringing race into the election when the GOP failed to do so, to which at first, Obama and his campaigned denied, but later admitted that his race was part of what he was talking about in his statements.
As
ABC reported in early August, Obama's campaign chief strategist, David Axelrod, made that acknowledgment on Good Morning America and later, Obama himself
conceded the same point as reported by ABC'S Political Punch, stating:
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that my comments have nothing to do with race." He then went on to clarify what he meant by his original statement back in July, by saying,
"Here's what I was saying and I think this should be undisputed: That I don’t come out of central casting, when it comes to presidential races. For a whole range of reasons. I’m young, I’m new to the national scene, my name is Barack Obama, I am African American, I was born in Hawaii, I spent time in Indonesia. I do not have the typical biography of a presidential candidate. What that means is that I’m sort of unfamiliar and people are still trying to get a fix on who I am, where I come from, what my values are and so forth in a way that might not be true if I seemed more familiar."
Later in his statement Obama admitted the McCain was not being racist in any way, saying,
"Let me be clear: In no way do I think that John McCain’s campaign was being racist; I think they’re cynical. And I think they want to distract people from talking about the real issues. And so it’s of a piece with the Britney/Paris ad or the most recent Web site, or the allegation that somehow I wouldn’t go visit the troops unless I had reporters with me, which every reporter who was on the trip knows is absolutely not true."
TODAY.
Today, once again, Barack Obama's race has been brought front and center while campaigning, this time by Joe Biden, the vice presidential running mate on the Democratic ticket.
Biden was in North Carolina, discussing how he believed this election was the "most important" election that any living person has seen in their lifetime as he spoke about Barack Obama's policies.
The Joe Biden singled out one specific factor in regards to why this election was so important.
Barack Obama's race.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, campaigning in North Carolina where black votes could help swing the state to the Democrats, said today that electing a black person to the White House would be transformative.
Biden's words, shown by
Citizen-Times, about the meaning of electing someone who is black, were
"That will be a transformative event in American politics and internationally. That all by itself will be significant."
The last time the majority of North Carolina voted for a Democrat was 1976, when they voted for Jimmy Carter and North Carolina has a large black population to which many seem to think Joe Biden was aiming for with his racial comments about Barack Obama's color.
Despite previous warnings to the contrary, instead of Republicans bringing Barack Obama's race to the forefront of the general election campaign, first it was Obama himself and now Joe Biden that has done so.
