Now John McCain is accusing Barack Obama of 'playing the race card.' If any further demonstration were needed that McCain is doing inverse campaigning--campaigning as though he will of a certainty never have to hold the office he's nominally running for-- and also that McCain is Bush Three, this is it.

'Orwellian' is the term so often invoked to characterize the Bush-Cheney administration, its rhetoric, its policies if you call them that, etc, and with ample justification. I wrote columns, in little DC-area newspapers, about the term and its applicability, myself. Bush-Cheney may well retire the trophy for Orwellianisms in every context of importance.

But McCain has pulled a nifty. 'Playing the race card,' you see, used to signify the kind of campaign tactic employed by a George Wallace or a Strom Thurmond or--let's face it--most of the Republicans running for office in the South from about 1960 on. Playing the race card--that is, playing on the racial fears or antipathies or ignorance of some white people worked, in elections. It worked, politically speaking, because whites were (and are) in the MAJORITY. If you could bring enough of them out to vote on grounds contrary to their own interest, or if you could distract enough of them from their interest . . .

Sigh.

McCain has given the old phrase a new twist, a sort of Wayne's World application, like that series of scenes in Wayne's World where the two unworthies pull a series of stunts like paying the hooker first and then running off before she can have sex with them. McCain is accusing the black guy in the race of using a race card that political wisdom used to assign to the majority. He is asserting, and Eric Arthur Blair would have appreciated this, that it's really the person who happens to be a member of a minority group that derives advantage from . . .

This line of attack is sadly reminiscent of what the Clintons tried to pull off in the interminable primary season, the line of thought that Obama's being black is somehow an unfair advantage.

In any case, it's hard to get around the basic oddness of the McCain campaign. Looking like a sore loser is one thing; swinging apparently at random, this early in a race, is another. It still looks as though McCain feels that he will never be held to account for what he's currently saying.

Odd. On a related topic--as of now, it seems that Mitt Romney has disavowed interest in running for the vice-presidency. Hard to figure whom McCain could be standing in for, therefore. Surely they won't actually uncork Jeb Bush.