Democrat Barack Obama, the first black candidate with a shot at winning the White House, says John McCain and his Republican allies will try to scare them by saying Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

What a sneak: Obama plays victim while unjustly calling John McCain racist. The self-proclaimed “post racial” candidate never stops reminding people that he’s black.  In Berlin:

“I know that I don’t look like the other Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”

What does Barack mean, he’s only half black, unlike Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice?

UPDATE:

James Taranto at Best of the Web offers this analysis:

Then things got interesting. Obama responded by suggesting McCain was, of all things, racist. The Associated Press reports:

Stumping in an economically challenged battleground state, Obama argued Wednesday that President Bush and McCain will resort to scare tactics to maintain their hold on the White House because they have little else to offer voters.

“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,” Obama said. “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.”

Pro-Obama writers were more explicit in accusing the McCain camp of racism, laughably suggesting that the ad’s producers had chosen Hilton and Spears because they were slatterns of pallor. “I note with interest today, John McCain’s new tactic of associating Barack Obama with oversexed and/or promiscuous young white women,” wrote Josh Marshall on TalkingPointsMemo.com. “In juxtaposing Barack Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, the McCain campaign is simply trying to plant the old racist seed of black man hitting on young white woman,” echoed Bill Press on the Puffington Host.

Or maybe that Paris Hilton became famous for being, uh, famous?

In any case, the McCain campaign “accused Barack Obama . . . of playing racial politics,” reports the Associated Press:

Obama “played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a statement. He called Obama’s remarks “divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

The Obama campaign in turn claimed it was all a big misunderstanding, according to another AP dispatch:

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the senator was not referring to race.

“What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” Gibbs said. “There is nothing more to this than the fact that he was describing that he was new to the political scene. He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

There is a lot of silliness on both sides here. First of all, the notion that the McCain ad plays to stereotypes of black men as sexual predators is far-fetched. The invidious old stereotype has to do with black men as a threat to white feminine innocence, and it is hard to imagine two less innocent symbols than Hilton and Spears.

The notion that Obama was not making a racial appeal is preposterous as well. Are we to believe that when he said he doesn’t “look like” the presidents on money, he meant that he lacks a wig and a beard? That’s certainly not what President Clinton had in mind when he said he wanted a cabinet that “looks like America.” Besides, Obama has made essentially the same appeal in the past in an explicitly racial way.

At the same time, it was foolish of McCain’s campaign to lash out at Obama for playing the “race card.” Each campaign is better off talking as little about race as possible.

Much of Obama’s salvific appeal to white voters has to do with race, which has been called America’s original sin. To those whites who feel guilty about America’s racial history, he offers a degree of absolution. To those who do not, he offers an opportunity to prove that America is not irredeemably racist, hopefully diminishing tiresome demands for race-consciousness.

If Obama seems to have a racial chip on his shoulder–as he does when he makes baseless charges of Republican racism–that diminishes this transracial appeal. If Republicans actually do seem preoccupied by race–as they do when they get defensive about Obama’s playing the “race card”–that enhances Obama’s appeal.

Each campaign has an interest in provoking the other to make race an issue, while studiously avoiding doing the same thing. So far both campaigns seem to be succeeding in the former and failing in the latter.